Stretching the limits of steganography
Stephen Junior1996, Information Hiding
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
We present a number of insights into information hiding. It was widely believed that public key steganography was impossible; we show how to do it. We then look at a number of possible approaches to the theoretical security of hidden communications. This turns out to hinge on the ine ciency of practical compression algorithms, and one of the most important parameters is whether the opponent is active or passive (i.e., whether the censor can add noise, or will merely allow or disallow a whole messages). However, there are covertexts whose compression characteristics are such that even an active opponent cannot always eliminate hidden channels completely.
Related papers
Perfectly Secure Steganography: Capacity, Error Exponents, and Code Constructions
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2000
An analysis of steganographic systems subject to the following perfect undetectability condition is presented in this paper. Following embedding of the message into the covertext, the resulting stegotext is required to have exactly the same probability distribution as the covertext. Then no statistical test can reliably detect the presence of the hidden message. We refer to such steganographic schemes as perfectly secure. A few such schemes have been proposed in recent literature, but they have vanishing rate. We prove that communication performance can potentially be vastly improved; specifically, our basic setup assumes independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) covertext, and we construct perfectly secure steganographic codes from public watermarking codes using binning methods and randomized permutations of the code. The permutation is a secret key shared between encoder and decoder. We derive (positive) capacity and random-coding exponents for perfectly-secure steganographic systems. The error exponents provide estimates of the code length required to achieve a target low error probability.
Constructing perfect steganographic systems
Information and Computation, 2011
We propose steganographic systems for the case when covertexts (containers) are generated by an i.i.d. or a finite-memory distribution, with known or unknown statistics. The probability distributions of covertexts with and without hidden information are the same; this means that the proposed stegosystems are perfectly secure, i.e. an observer cannot determine whether hidden information is being transmitted. In contrast, existing results only include methods for which the distributions of covertexts with and without hidden text are close but not equal.
<title>Applied public-key steganography</title>
Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IV, 2002
We consider the problem of hiding information in a steganographic framework, i.e. embedding a binary message within an apparently innocuous content, in order to establish a 'suspicion-free' digital communication channel. The adversary is passive as no intentional attack is foreseen. The only threat is that she discovers the presence of a hidden communication. The main goal of this article is to find if the Scalar Costa Scheme, a recently published embedding method exploiting side information at the encoder, is suitable for that framework. We justify its use assessing its security level with respect to the Cachin's criterion. We derive a public-key stegosystem following the ideas of R. Anderson and P. Petitcolas. This technique is eventually applied to PCM audio contents. Experimental performances are detailed in terms of bit-rate and Kullback-Leibler distance.
Novel Use of Steganography for Both Confidentiality and Compression
International Journal of Engineering …, 2010
Text is one of the most important data that is transmitted on today's communication networks, in the form of html WebPages, commands to access devices remotely using ssh or telnet, email etc. Confidentiality is one of the fundamental requirements for secure communication on an untrusted channel and compression is also required to conserve the bandwidth of the channel. In this study, steganography is used in a completely novel way that is different from the traditional use of steganography. Confidentiality and compression of large text using steganography is presented. In our approach text i.e. message is encoded using a grayscale bitmap image. The image acts as a steganographic carrier for the text, the carrier is never transmitted across the untrusted channel.
Steganography and Broadcasting
Informally, steganography is the process of exchanging a secret message between two communicating entities so that an eavesdropper may not know that a message has been sent. After a review of some steganographic systems, we found that these systems have some defects. First, there are situations in which some concealment algorithms do not properly hide a secret message. Second, to conceal one bit of a secret message, some ask at least five documents and make at least two sampling operations, thus increasing their run-times. Considering the different ways to communicate with the receiver, we propose two steganographic systems adapted to the email communication whose algorithms are deterministic. To hide one bit of a secret message, our steganographic systems need only one document and performs one sampling operation and therefore significantly reduces the run-time.
On The Limits Of Perfect Security For Steganographic System
Until now the discussion on perfect security for steganographic systems has remained confined within the realm of mathematicians and information theory experts whose concise and symbolic representation of their philosophies, postulates, and inference thereafter has made it hard for the na\"ive academics to have an insight of the concepts. This paper is an endeavor not only to appraise on the limitations of one of such pioneer comprehensions but also to illustrate a pitfall in another scheme that asserts on having perfect security without the use of public or secret key. Goals set are accomplished through contrasting test results of a steganographic scheme that exploits English words with corresponding acronyms for hiding bits of secret information in chat - a preferred way to exchange messages these days. The misapprehension about perfect security and reign in characteristic of stego key in bit embedding process are unfolded respectively by launching elementary chosen-message a...
Exploring steganography: Seeing the unseen
1998
Steganography and cryptography are cousins in the spycraft family. Cryptography scrambles a message so it cannot be understood. Steganography hides the message so it cannot be seen. A message in ciphertext, for instance, might arouse suspicion on the part of the recipient while an “invisible” message created with steganographic methods will not. In this article we discuss image files and how to hide information in them, and we discuss results obtained from evaluating available steganographic software.
Abstract Information Hiding: Steganography and
2008
The goal of steganography is to insert a message into a carrier signal so that it cannot be detected by unintended recipients. Due to their widespread use and availability of bits that can be changed without perceptible damage of the original signal images, video, and audio are widespread carrier media. Steganalysis attempts to discover hidden signals in suspected carriers or at the least detect which media contain hidden signals. Therefore, an important consideration in steganography is how robust to detection is a particular technique. We review the existing steganography and steganalysis techniques and discuss their limitations and some possible research directions. Key words: Information hiding, steganography, steganalysis, watermarking 1
STEGANOGRAPH(Y)SM-A Concealed world
Steganography is meant for confidential communication as well as secret data sharing between sender and a receiver using various media files. Today, it's being broadly used over Internet. Due to the rapid development in Technology and Communication and the use of Internet at alarming rate, the security of the data and information is a major concern these days. Every day, confidential data has been jeopardize and unauthorized access of data has crossed the limits. Steganography provide us to conceal the presence of confidential data, difficult to detect the embedded data and enhancing the stealthiness of the encrypted data. The crucial information is being encrypted into media file such as images, audio, text as well as video as it is the art of hiding information. As steganography is very close to cryptography and its applications so both are widely used techniques that encrypt data in order to cipher or hide their existence. This paper focuses on various pros and cons of steganography, overview to its techniques and relationship with cryptography.
Hiding Information-A Survey
2015
Steganography is the science that involves communicating secret data in an appropriate multimedia carrier, e.g., image audio, and video files. It comes under the assumption that if the feature is visible, the point of attack is evident, thus the goal here is always to conceal the very existence of the embedded data. In comparison with Analog media, Digital media offers several distinct advantages such as high quality, easy editing, high fidelity copying, compression etc. In order to address this Information Security, Steganography plays an important role. Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message. This paper is a tutorial review of the steganography techniques appeared in the literature.
Information-Theoretic Approach to Steganographic Systems
2007 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2007
We propose a simple universal (that is, distributionfree) steganographic system in which covertexts with and without hidden texts are statistically indistinguishable. The stegosystem can be applied to any source generating i.i.d. covertexts with unknown distribution, and the hidden text is transmitted exactly, with zero probability of error. Sequences of covertexts with and without hidden information obey the same distribution (the stegosystem is perfectly secure). The proposed steganographic system has two important properties. First, the rate of transmission of hidden information approaches the Shannon entropy of the covertext source as the size of blocks used for hidden text encoding tends to infinity. Second, if the size of the alphabet of the covertext source and its minentropy tend to infinity then the number of bits of hidden text per letter of covertext tends to log(n!)/n where n is the (fixed) size of blocks used for hidden text encoding. Besides, the resource complexity of the proposed algorithms grows only polynomially.
Different Medias of Steganography-An Emerging Field of Network Security
2012
Steganography, literally meaning “secret writing”, involves hiding a data file in another innocuous-looking file. From the time of Herodotus in Greece, to the defense mechanisms of today, steganography has been used to deny one’s adversaries the knowledge of message traffic. Steganography takes one piece of information and hides it within another. A “container file” holds the secret message in it, in such a way that the existence of the message cannot be suspected. This could be done in several possible ways, with newer methods being discovered with each passing day. In this paper, a detailed analysis of steganography is made. The history of steganography is briefly dealt with. How steganography works is examined, keeping in mind Bender’s specifications. Data hiding is implemented in three different media; text, audio and image files. Each offers challenges and solutions to these challenges are analysed. How they is implemented using steganographic tools is also seen. The main chara...
Public-Key Steganography with Active Attacks
2005
A complexity-theoretic model for public-key steganography with active attacks is introduced. The notion of steganographic security against adaptive chosen-covertext attacks (SS-CCA) and a relaxation called steganographic security against replayable adaptive chosen-covertext attacks (SS-RCCA) are formalized. These notions are closely related with CCA-security and RCCA-security for public-key cryptosystems. In particular, it is shown that any SS-(R)CCA stegosystem is an (R)CCA-secure public-key cryptosystem and that an SS-RCCA stegosystem can be realized from any RCCA-secure public-key cryptosystem with pseudorandom ciphertexts.
An Information-Theoretic Model for Steganography * Christian Cachin
An information-theoretic model for steganography with a passive adversary is proposed. The adversary's task of distinguishing between an innocent cover message C and a modified message S containing hidden information is interpreted as a hypothesis testing problem. The security of a steganographic system is quantified in terms of the relative entropy (or discrimination) between the distributions of C and S, which yields bounds on the detection capability of any adversary. It is shown that secure steganographic schemes exist in this model provided the covertext distribution satisfies certain conditions. A universal stegosystem is presented in this model that needs no knowledge of the covertext distribution, except that it is generated from independently repeated experiments. * To appear in Information and Computation. A preliminary version of this work was presented at the 2nd
Provably Secure Universal Steganographic Systems
IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2006
We propose a simple universal (that is, distribution-free) steganographic system in which covertexts with and without hidden texts are statistically indistinguishable. Moreover, the proposed steganographic system has two important properties. First, the rate of transmission of hidden information approaches the Shannon entropy of the covertext source as the size of blocks used for hidden text encoding tends to infinity. Second, if the size of the alphabet of the covertext source and its minentropy tend to infinity then the the number of bits of hidden text per letter of covertext tends to log(n!)/n where n is the (fixed) size of blocks used for hidden text encoding. The proposed stegosystem uses randomization.
An information-theoretic model for steganography
Information Hiding, 1998
An information-theoretic model for steganography with passive adversaries is proposed. The adversary's task of distinguishing between an innocent c o ver message C and a modi ed message S containing a secret part is interpreted as a hypothesis testing problem. The security of a steganographic system is quanti ed in terms of the relative e n tropy or discrimination between P C and P S . Several secure steganographic schemes are presented in this model; one of them is a universal information hiding scheme based on universal data compression techniques that requires no knowledge of the covertext statistics.
Steganography-A Game of Hide and Seek in Information Communication Steganography-A Game of Hide and Seek in Information Communication
With the growth of communication over computer networks, how to maintain the confidentiality and security of transmitted information has become an important issue. In order to transfer data securely to the destination without unwanted disclosure or damage, nature inspired hide and seek tricks such as, cryptography and Steganography are heavily in use. Just like the Chameleon and many other bio-species those change their body color and hide themselves in the background in order to protect them from external attacks, Cryptography and Steganography are techniques those are used to encrypt and hide the secret data inside other media to ensure data security. This paper discusses the concept of a simple spatial domain LSB Steganography that encrypts the secrets using Fibonacci-Lucas transformation before hiding for better security.
Efficient Public Key Steganography Secure Against Adaptive Chosen Stegotext Attacks∞
2008
Abstract. We provide construction of steganographic schemes secure against adaptive chosen stegotext attacks. Our constructions achieve embedding rate equals to the Shannon entropy bound on steganographic channel capacity. Further the covertext distribution can ...
Analysis of Different Steganographic Algorithms for Secured Data Hiding
The goal of steganography is to avoid drawing suspicion to the transmission of a hidden message. If suspicion is raised, steganography may fail. The success of steganography depends on the secrecy of the action. If steganography is detected, the system will fail but data security depends on the robustness of the applied algorithm. In this paper, we compress the secret message and encrypt it by the receiver's public key along with the stego key and embed both messages in a carrier using an embedding algorithm. The stego -image is the result we get by running the algorithm you select on the message (file to hide) and cover (image). It can be saved into BMP or PNG format. The reason that it can only be saved in these formats is because they are lossless -there is no information lost as part of the file formatting. The various applications of steganography include secure military communications, multimedia watermarking and fingerprinting applications for authentication purposed to curb the problem of digital piracy.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.