Information Hiding: Steganography and Steganalysis

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. Steganalysis is the art and science of detecting messages hidden using steganography; this is analogous to cryptanalysis applied to cryptography. In this paper, we provide a critical review of the steganalysis algorithms available to analyze the characteristics of an image, audio or video stego media vis-à-vis the corresponding cover media (without the hidden information) and understand the process of embedding the information and its detection. It is noteworthy that each of these cover media has different special attributes that are altered by a steganography algorithm in such a way that the changes are not perceivable for the unintended recipients; but, the changes are identifiable using appropriate steganlysis algorithms. We anticipate that this paper can also give a clear picture of the current trends in steganography so that we can develop and improvise appropriate steganlysis algorithms.

Journal of Global Research in Computer Science, 2011

The staggering growth in communication technology and usage of public domain channels (i.e. Internet) has greatly facilitated transfer of data. However, such open communication channels have greater vulnerability to security threats causing unauthorized information access. Traditionally, encryption is used to realize the communication security. However, important information is not protected once decoded. Steganography is the art and science of communicating in a way which hides the existence of the communication. Important information is firstly hidden in a host data, such as digital image, text, video or audio, etc, and then transmitted secretly to the receiver. Steganalysis is another important topic in information hiding which is the art of detecting the presence of steganography. This paper provides a critical review of steganography as well as to analyze the characteristics of various cover media namely image, text, a u d i o and video in respects of the fundamental concepts, the progress of steganographic methods and the development of the corresponding steganalysis schemes.

2021

In current days, there is a constant evolution in modern technology. The most predominant usage of technology by society is the internet. There are many ways and means on the internet through which data is transmitted. Having such rapid and fast growth of communicating media also increases the exposure to security threats, causing unintellectual information ingress. Steganography is the main aspect of communicating in an aspect that hides the extent of communication. Steganalysis is another essential concern in data concealing, which is the art of identifying the existence of steganography. A framework has been designed to identify the concealed data in the multimedia file in the proposed system. This work's main strength is analyzing concealed data images without embedding and extracting the image's payloads. A quantitative steganalysis approach was considered to accomplish the proposed objective. By using this approach, the results were achieved with 98% accuracy.

2015

Here we have critically compared various information security methods and also have covered Steganography overview, its major types, classification with less detail of Steganalysis, which is the art and science of defeating Steganography.

2007

A new, simple, approach for active steganography is proposed in this paper that can successfully resist recent blind steganalysis methods, in addition to surviving distortion constrained attacks. We present Yet Another Steganographic Scheme (YASS), a method based on embedding data in randomized locations so as to disable the self-calibration process (such as, by cropping a few pixel rows and/or columns to estimate the cover image features) popularly used by blind steganalysis schemes. The errors induced in the embedded data due to the fact that the stego signal must be advertised in a specific format such as JPEG, are dealt with by the use of erasure and error correcting codes. For the presented JPEG steganograhic scheme, it is shown that the detection rates of recent blind steganalysis schemes are close to random guessing, thus confirming the practical applicability of the proposed technique. We also note that the presented steganography framework, of hiding in randomized locations and using a coding framework to deal with errors, is quite simple yet very generalizable.

annals of telecommunications - annales des télécommunications, 2013

Transcoding steganography (TranSteg) is a fairly new IP telephony steganographic method that functions by compressing overt (voice) data to make space for the steganogram by means of transcoding. It offers high steganographic bandwidth, retains good voice quality, and is generally harder to detect than other existing VoIP steganographic methods. In TranSteg, after the steganogram reaches the receiver, the hidden information is extracted, and the speech data is practically restored to what was originally sent. This is a huge advantage compared with other existing VoIP steganographic methods, where the hidden data can be extracted and removed, but the original data cannot be restored because it was previously erased due to a hidden data insertion process. In this paper, we address the issue of steganalysis of TranSteg. Various TranSteg scenarios and possibilities of warden(s) localization are analyzed with regards to the TranSteg detection. A novel steganalysis method based on Gaussian mixture models and melfrequency cepstral coefficients was developed and tested for various overt/covert codec pairs in a single warden scenario with double transcoding. The proposed method allowed for efficient detection of some codec pairs (e.g., G.711/G.729), while some others remained more resistant to detection (e.g., iLBC/AMR).

Journal of Steganography and its Application, 2019

The purpose of this journal is to highlight some of the application areas where steganography are most effective. However, the highlighted areas are not limited to the applicable areas. It's just the accumulation of the commonly recognized areas. Steganalysis is a newly emerging data processing branch that seeks to identify steganographic covers and, where possible, extract messages

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2009

In recent years, several lossless data hiding techniques have been proposed for images. Lossless data embedding can take place in the spatial domain or in the transform domain. They utilized characteristics of the difference image or the transform coefficient histogram and modify these values slightly to embed the data. However, after embedding message bits these steganography changed the nature of the difference image histogram or the transform coefficient histogram gradually. In this paper, we introduce two new steganalytic techniques based on the difference image histogram and the transform coefficient histogram. The algorithm can not only detect existence of secret messages in images which are embedded by above methods reliably, but also estimate the amount of hidden messages exactly.

Information Hiding, 1998

Steganography is the art of passing information in a manner that the very existence of the message is unknown. The goal of steganography is to avoid drawing suspicion to the transmission of a hidden message. If suspicion is raised, then this goal is defeated. Steganalysis is the art of discovering and rendering useless such covert messages. In this paper, we identify characteristics in current steganography software that direct the steganalyst to the existence of a hidden message and introduce the ground work of a tool for automatically detecting the existence of hidden messages in images.

Lecture Notes Series, Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore, 2007

In the last few years, we have seen many new and powerful steganography and steganalysis techniques reported in the literature. In the following tutorial we go over some general concepts and ideas that apply to steganography and steganalysis. We review and discuss the notions of steganographic security and capacity. Some of the more recent image steganography and steganalysis techniques are analyzed with this perspective, and their contributions are highlighted.