In the last few years, the protection of computerised medical records, and of other personal health information, has become the subject of both technical research and political dispute in a number of countries. In Britain, the issue arose initially as an argument between the British Me dical Association and the Department of Health over whether encryption should be used in a new medical network. In Germany, the focus was the issue to all patients of a smartcard to hold insurance details and facilitate payment; while in the USA, the debate has been whether federal law should preempt state re...

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the First International Workshop on Information Hiding, held in Cambridge, UK, in May/June 1996, within the research programme in computer security, cryptology and coding theory organized by the volume editor at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge.
Work on information hiding has been carried out over the last few years within different research communities, mostly unaware of each other's existence. The 26 papers presented define the state of the art and lay the foundation for a common terminology. This workshop is...