Steganalysis of transcoding steganography

2011

Abstract The paper presents a new steganographic method for IP telephony called TranSteg (Transcoding Steganography). Typically, in steganographic communication it is advised for covert data to be compressed in order to limit its size. In TranSteg it is the overt data that is compressed to make space for the steganogram. The main innovation of TranSteg is to, for a chosen voice stream, find a codec that will result in a similar voice quality but smaller voice payload size than the originally selected. Then, the voice stream is transcoded.

2009

ii Dedication Dedicated to My beloved parents, my darling supportive wife, my gorgeous daughter, my dearest siblings and to all whom were beside me iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First and foremost praise and gratitude be to ALLAH, almighty, without whose gracious help it would have been impossible to accomplish this work. I was extraordinarily fortunate in having Prof. Dr. Azizah Bt. Abd Manaf as my supervisor in UTM. I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation to her, who has supported me throughout my project with her patience and knowledge whilst allowing me the room to work in my own way. I attribute the level of my Masters degree to her encouragement and effort and without her this project, too, would not have been completed or written. One simply could not wish for a better or friendlier supervisor. Many thanks to each lecturer in UTM-CASE, they were my guidance to achieve my goals, they gave me all the support I need and were always kind. My entire study in this honorable institute was an everyday opportunity to acquire fine knowledge. Furthermore, my special thanks go to my friend and colleague Saeed AlQahtani for his indispensable advices, valuable assistance and sincere companionship.

International Journal of Computing and Digital Systems

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a popular and important internet protocol for real-time voice calling. It is used in several software applications such as Skype, WhatsApp, and Google Talk. However, communications over the internet can easily be exposed to hacking and eavesdropping. In secret communication, a private channel with robust encryption can provide the required protection for the communications. But private channels have more constraints than the public channel, such as specific communication devices and specific regions to cover. On the other hand, public communications such as VoIP can be done from anywhere without extra costs. This paper proposes a real-time covert communication approach that generates a secret speech channel inside a public speech channel based on audio steganography. The process requires high embedding capacity in a real-time manner. Therefore, the proposed approach encodes the secret speech using Internet Low Bit Rate Codec (iLBC) that can be used as a VoIP source Codec to compress the secret input speech with auto-correction for speech quality degradation over a lossy channel. Also, the cover speech is compressed by G.711 encoder at synchronous time periods (for each 20 ms) with respect to the secret speech to meet the requirements of the VoIP. Subsequently, the secret data hides in compressed cover speech data in real-time. The embedding procedure employs the only high strength data to maintain the quality of the cover data after embedding at greater than 40 dB in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (S NR). The secret data is 100% retrieved without error in the case of a lossless channel. This approach can be used in secure communications such as military and government communications.

2011 Fifth International Conference on Secure Software Integration and Reliability Improvement, 2011

VoIP steganography is a real-time network steganography, which utilizes VoIP protocols and traffic as a covert channel to conceal secret messages. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in the interest in VoIP steganography due to the volume of VoIP traffic generated, which proved to be economically feasible to utilize. This paper discusses VoIP steganography challenges, compares the existing mechanisms, and proposes a new VoIP steganography approach. Current VoIP steganography techniques lack mechanisms to provide reliability without weakening the steganography system. Accordingly, this paper modifies the (k, n) threshold secret sharing scheme, which is based on Lagrange's Interpolation, and then applies a two phase approach on the LACK steganography mechanism to provide reliability and fault tolerance and to increase steganalysis complexity. The cost of reliability is a loss in bandwidth; therefore, the proposed approach also provides mechanisms to maximize packets utilization to mitigate the effect of adding redundancy.

2009

Differing from applying steganography on storage cover media, steganography on Voice over IP (VoIP) must often delicately balance between providing adequate security and maintaining low latency for real-time services. This paper presents a novel real-time steganography model for VoIP that aims at providing good security for secret messages without sacrificing real-time performance. We achieve this goal by employing the well-known least-significant-bits (LSB) substitution approach to provide a reasonable tradeoff between the adequate information hiding requirement (good security and sufficient capacity) and the low latency requirement for VoIP. Further, we incorporate the m-sequence technique to eliminate the correlation among secret messages to resist the statistical detection based on the fact that the distribution of the LSBs in the stego-speech is not uniform and to provide a short-term security protection of secret messages. To accurately recover secret messages at the receiver side, we design a synchronization mechanism based on the RSA key agreement and the synchronized sequence transmission using techniques of the protocol steganography, which can effectively enhance the flexibility of the covert communication system and be extended to other steganography schemes based on real-time systems. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model with ITU-T G.729a as the codec of the cover speech in StegTalk, a covert communication system based on VoIP. The experimental results demonstrate that our techniques provide good security and transparency for transmitting secret messages while adequately meeting the real-time requirement of VoIP. 1

2013

Current practice of data hiding technique exists, uses image, audio, video, or protocol headers as medium for hiding our information. The real-time text hiding is to hide the secret text into a cover speech in realtime communication systems such as voice over Internet Protocol. VOIP the new and promising communication medium that can be used as a host for steganography. Steganography is an effective way of hiding secret data, by this means of protecting the data from unauthorized or unwanted viewing. An informationsmuggling technique called Steganographythe communication of secret messages inside a perfectly innocent carrier.Using cryptography technique will encrypt and decrypt message to provide better security. Cryptography protects the message from being read by unauthorized parties, steganography lets the sender conceal the fact that he has even sent a message. By hiding one secret text into the cover speech using steganography we can get a stegospeech, which sounds meaningful a...

Proceedings of the 7th …, 2008

The functional and cost advantages of Internet telephony are evident. By today's technical standards, however, Voice Over IP (VOIP) is still less secure than traditional telephony. At the same time, the hacker scene is constantly looking for new weak spots and developing ...

International Journal of Computer and Communication Technology, 2017

Steganography is an effective way of hiding secret data, by this means of protecting the data from unauthorized or unwanted viewing. Using cryptography technique will encrypt and decrypt message to provide better security. Cryptography protects the message from being read by unauthorized parties, steganography lets the sender conceal the fact that he has even sent a message. One of the new and promising communication medium that can be used as steganography is the Voice over Internet Protocol. VOIP covers a wide range of information hiding techniques. The main idea is to use free unused fields of VOIP protocols like TCP, UDP etc. By hiding one secret text into the cover speech using steganography we can get a stego speech, which sounds indistinguishable from the original cover speech. So even if the Hackers/crackers catch the audio packets on network, they would not notice that there is some secret text hidden inside it. To develop a Voice Chat Tool, this can also enable us to send ...

The 2010 International Conference on Computer Engineering & Systems, 2010

The functional and cost advantages of Internet telephony are evident. By today's technical standards, however, Voice Over IP (VOIP) is still less secure than traditional telephony. At the same time, the hacker scene is constantly looking for new weak spots and developing ingenious methods of attack to gain access to confidential information and penetrate further into the network. [1] One of the most security issues faced by VOIP is end-to-end user identity, specially the responder identity and how to authenticate it. This is important specially to guarantee the privacy and the integrity of the response information. In this research we will discuss some security issues about VOIP , the role of steganography in VOIP communication, and a proposed mechanism to secure VOIP based on steganography and One Time Password.

2009 International Conference on Multimedia Information Networking and Security, 2009

In 2005, an extensive taxonomy of threats for VoIP was published by a prominent industry group. Strangely, this taxonomy does not identify stegocommunication as a threat, even though many steganographic channels have been identified in VoIP protocols. To avoid such security gaps in the future, we argue that stegocommunication should be added to the traditional list of network threats: interruption, interception, modification, fabrication. The stegocommunication threat arises when the communication channel is purchased, provided, or supervised by anyone other than the communicating parties. We illustrate a stegocommunication threat to a business owner Charles. If Charles purchases a VoIP service for business-related communications by an employee Alice, then he faces the risk that Alice may undetectably communicate a business secret to an outside party Bob. In this insider-threat scenario, Charles can mitigate his security risk by installing a stegodetector.