Workshop Description

The increasing number of Internet users, availability of storage and network resources, and proliferation of as-a-Service frameworks, leads to a new-wave of offensive campaigns targeting the virtual world. With the diffusion of improved defensive methods, attackers now utilize more and more sophisticated techniques to perform their malicious activities. In recent years, information hiding has emerged as one of the most sophisticated and effective mechanisms for launching attacks. Threat actors now regularly use information hiding to elude countermeasures and prevent reversing the attack chain. More recently, hiding techniques have been deployed to create covert channels, i.e., parasitic communications paths nested in network traffic and digital objects, mainly to cloak command & control communications. Unfortunately, detection and mitigation of threats taking advantage of information hiding are hard tasks that pose many new challenges for digital forensics analysts, academics, law enforcement agencies, and security professionals.

The aim of the International Workshop on Cyber Use of Information Hiding (CUIng) is to bring together researchers, practitioners, law enforcement representatives, and security professionals in the area of analysis of information hiding techniques when used in cyberspace. Techniques, mechanisms, and ideas that fall in the scope of the workshop are not limited to classic digital steganography applications or the creation and mitigation of covert communications. Therefore, CUIng also welcomes works that pertain to camouflaging/masking/hiding various types of data, e.g., identities, behaviors of processes, and communication flows. To present a more complete picture of the novel research on hiding methods and their utilization by the attackers, submissions dealing with impersonation or mimicking are encouraged as well, especially to address information hiding in a complete manner, for instance, to discuss ideas for fighting misuse of privacy-enhancing technologies.

Moreover, the extended versions of all accepted papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Cyber Security and Mobility (indexed in Scopus).

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Cyber information hiding techniques
• Studies regarding the use of information hiding in cybercrime
• Analysis of cybercrime cases related to information hiding
• New steganographic & steganalysis methods
• Local, air-gapped, and network covert channels
• Side channels and less obvious usage of information hiding techniques
• Digital watermarking of multimedia content and network traffic
• Stegomalware-related research, including techniques and detection
• Novel countermeasures against information hiding techniques: detection, prevention, limitation
• Evasion, obfuscation, and anti-forensics techniques used in cyberattacks
• Traffic type obfuscation techniques, e.g., traffic morphing
• Hiding covert communication within network attacks, e.g., DDoS, SPAM, etc.
• Underground marketplaces and their business models (e.g., legal and technical aspects of darknet)
• Information-hiding-based botnets and their mitigation
• Information hiding based on adversarial learning and generative AI
• Utilization of AI/ML techniques for improved data hiding techniques and detection methods
• Information hiding in AI/ML models and datasets
• Utilization of information hiding techniques to fight disinformation
• Privacy enhancing techniques
• Aspects and methods for sharing strategic intelligence
• Abusing legitimate social media, cloud-based services, etc. for information hiding purposes

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: May 16, 2025 (extended!)
Author notification: May 30, 2025
Camera-ready version: June 13, 2025

Workshop Chairs

Wojciech Mazurczyk (Chair)
Warsaw University of Technology, Poland
wojciech.mazurczyk@pw.edu.pl

Philipp Amann (Chair)
Europol, European Cybercrime Centre, The Netherlands
Philipp.Amann@europol.europa.eu

Luca Caviglione (Chair)
CNR – IMATI, Italy
luca.caviglione@ge.imati.cnr.it

Angelo Consoli (Chair)
Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI), Switzerland
angelo.consoli@supsi.ch

Peter Kieseberg (Chair)
FH St. Pölten, Austria
Peter.Kieseberg@fhstp.ac.at

Joerg Keller (Chair)
FernUniversitaet in Hagen, Germany
Joerg.Keller@fernuni-hagen.de