and not restrictive of the present invention those of ordinary skill in the art will further appreciate that a wide range of computers and computing system configurations can be used to support the methods of the present invention including for example configurations encompassing multiple systems the internet and distributed networks accordingly the teachings contained herein should be viewed as highly u201c scalable u201d meaning that they are adaptable to implementation on one or several thousand computer systems the present invention provides a system and method of hiding information in an instruction processing pipeline in particular the present invention hides information in arbitrary program binaries this is done by identifying stalls in the instruction processing pipeline instead of filling these stalls with no operation nop instructions the stalls are filled with instructions which will not adversely alter the functionality of the program but which encode a hidden message the present invention can be used for secret communication or for watermarking fingerprinting it can also be used for encoding a digital signature of the executable code the present invention in one embodiment is a code steganographic technique that takes a message and an executable as input and outputs a semantically equivalent executable which contains the secret message to accomplish this the present invention may analyze how the executable 39 s instruction sequence would be processed in the instruction processing pipeline the present invention takes advantage of the manner in which the executable 39 s instruction sequence is processed.