STEGANOGRAPH

Y
SUBMITTED BY-
MAYANK JAISWAL(0900410041)

PAWAN KR. VERMA(0900410055)

SUDHANSH GUPTA(0900410077)
 Outline
• What is Steganography ?
• Steganography – History
• Watermarking and Cryptography
• Steganography vs. Cryptography
• Steganography vs. Watermarking
• Steganography – Carrier Files
• Modern Steganography Techniques
• Basics of Modern Steganography
• Important Requirement for Steganographic System
• Uses for Steganography
• Steganography – Tools
• Detection of Steganographic Content/Countermeasures
• Existing Steganographic Techniques
• Existing Attacks
• Conclusion
• Reference
 What is Steganography ?

Steganography is of Greek origin and means “concealed

writing” -
• from the Greek word steganos meaning “covered”
• and the Greek word graphie meaning “writing”
Steganography is the process of hiding of a secret message
within an ordinary message and extracting it at its destination.
Steganography is a technique of hiding information in digital
media.
The art of detecting Steganography is referred to as
Steganalysis.
Figure-1
 Steganography - History

• Both Axis and Allied spies during World War II used such
measures as invisible inks using milk, fruit juice or urine
which darken when heated.
• It’s also a very good Anti-forensics mechanism to mitigate the
effectiveness of a forensics investigation
• In ancient Greece they used to select messenger & shave their
head, they would then write a message on their head, once the
message had been return the hair was allowed to grow back
after the hair grew back the messenger was sent to deliver the
message, the recipient would shave off the messengers hair to
seethe secret message
 Watermarking and Cryptography

There are two major branches of information hiding, Cryptography and Watermarking.

Watermarking :-
• Communication in watermarking is the host signal, with the embedded data
providing copyright protection.
• The existence of a watermark is often declared openly.
• Any attempt to remove or invalidate the embedded content renders the host
useless.

Cryptography :-
• Doesn’t conceal the communication.
• Scrambles the data to prevent eavesdroppers understanding the content.
• Cryptography involves various methods and implementations.
• May be considered complementary and orthogonal (unrelated).
Security level

Figure-2
 Steganography vs. Cryptography

Steganography and cryptography are closely related. Cryptography

scrambles messages so it can’t be understood. Steganography on the
other hand, hide the message so there is no knowledge of the existence of
the message. With cryptography, comparison is made between portions
of the plaintext and portions of the cipher text. In steganography,
comparisons may be made between the cover-media, the stego-media,
and possible portions of the message. The end result in cryptography is
the cipher text, while the end result in steganography is the stego-media.
The message in steganography may or may not be encrypted. If it is
encrypted, then a cryptanalysis technique is applied to extract the
message.
 Steganography vs. Watermarking

Digital watermarking can be a form of steganography, in which data is hidden

in the message without the end user's knowledge.It is a technique which allows
an individual to add hidden copyright notices or other verification messages to
digital audio, video, or image signals and documents. Such a message is a group
of bits describing information pertaining to the signal or to the author of the
signal (name, place, etc.) The technique takes its name from watermarking of
paper or money as a security measure.

Figure-3
Steganography – Carrier Files

• bmp (bit map picture)

• jpeg (joint photographic experts group)
• gif (graphics interchange format)
• wav (waveform audio)
• mpeg(moving picture experts group)
• png(portable network graphic)
Amongst others…
 Modern Steganography Techniques

1. Masking and Filtering: Is where information is hidden inside of a

image using digital watermarks that include information such as
copyright, ownership, or licenses.

2. Algorithms and Transformations: This technique hides data in

mathematical functions that are often used in compression
algorithms.

3. Least Significant Bit Insertion: The most common and popular

method of modern day steganography is to make use of the LSB of
a picture’s pixel information.
Basics of Modern Steganography

Figure-4
fE:     steganographic function "embedding"
fE-1:   steganographic function "extracting"
cover:  cover data in which emb will be hidden
emb:    message to be hidden
key:    parameter of fE
stego:  cover data with the hidden message
 Important Requirement for
Steganographic System
1. Security of the hidden communication

2. Size of the payload

3. Robustness against malicious and unintentional attacks

Figure-5
 Uses for Steganography
• Covert communications
 Privacy
 Espionage
 Terrorism
Criminal activities
• Intellectual property protection
Digital watermarks
Digital signatures
 Steganography - Tools

• Steganos
• S-Tools (GIF, JPEG)
• StegHide (WAV, BMP)
• Invisible Secrets (JPEG)
• JPHide
• Camouflage
• Hiderman
Many others…
 Detection of Steganographic
Content/Countermeasures
The detection of steganographically encoded packages is called
Steganalysis.
• Visual Analysis tries to reveal the presence of secret
communication through inspection, either with the naked
eye or with the assistance of a computer.
• Statistical (Algorithmic) Analysis reveals tiny alterations
in an image's statistical behavior caused by steganographic
embedding.
• The nominally universal methods developed to detect
embedded stego-data are generally less effective than the
steganalytic methods aimed at specific types of
embedding.
 DIFFERENT KINDS OF STEGANOGRAPHY

The four main categories of file formats that can be used for
steganography are:
I. Text
II. Images
III. Audio
IV. Protocol
Text steganography: Hiding information in text is the most important
method of steganography. The method was to hide a secret message in every
nth letter of every word of a text message. After booming of Internet and
different type of digital file formats it has decreased in importance. Text
stenography using digital files is not used very often because the text files
have a very small amount of redundant data.
Text steganography can be classified in three basic Categories:-
• Format-based
• Random
• Statistical generation and linguistic method.
Figure-6
Image steganography: Images are used as the popular cover objects for
steganography. A message is embedded in a digital image through an
embedding algorithm, using the secret key. The resulting stego image is
send to the receiver. On the other side, it is processed by the extraction
algorithm using the same key. During the transmission of stego image
unauthenticated persons can only notice the transmission of an image but
can’t guess the existence of the hidden message.

Figure-7
Audio steganography: Audio stenography is masking, which
exploits the properties of the human ear to hide information
unnoticeably. An audible, sound can be inaudible in the presene of
another louder audible sound .This property allows to select the
channel in which to hide information.

Figure-8
Protocol steganography: The term protocol
steganography is to embedding information within
network protocols such as TCP/IP. We hide
information in the header of a TCP/IP packet in some
fields that can be either optional or are never used.
Existing Steganographic Techniques

The steganographic algorithms can broadly be classified into

two categories :-

1. Spatial Domain Techniques

2. Transform Domain Techniques

Spatial Domain:- These techniques use the pixel gray levels and
their color values directly for encoding the message bits.

Transform Domain:- These techniques try to encode message

bits in the transform domain coefficients of the image.
 Existing Attacks
The steganalytic attacks developed till date can be classified into
visual and statistical attacks.
The statistical attacks can further be classified as :-
• Targeted Attacks: These attacks are designed keeping a particular
steganographic algorithm in mind.
 Histogram Analysis
 Sample Pair Analysis
 HCF-COM based Attack

• Blind Attacks: The blind approach to steganalysis is similar to the

pattern classification problem.
 Wavelet Moment Analysis
 Calibration Based Attacks
 Farid’s Wavelet Based Attack
 Conclusion
1. The approach proposed in this work aims at hampering the steganalysis
ability to effectively estimating the statistics for classification.

2. It was found that the calibration step is indeed able to estimate image model.
To counter this a generalized framework has been proposed which disturbs this
model estimation of the attack.

3. It is based on embedding data such that stego population remains

statistically closer to the cover population and the difference between these two
cannot be observed in the statistics drawn from the two populations and if any
how attacker may be able to know the embedding algorithm but in that case he
will not be able to know the right pattern of the message because we will
embed the message in the form of cipher text.

4. Like this our security will remain consistent. Like this proposed algo will be
successful in breaking calibration based blind attacks.
 Reference
 Park,S.K, and Miller, K.W. (1988). "Random Number Generators: Good
Ones Are Hard To Find". Communications of the ACM 31 (10): 1192–
1201.
 C. Kurak and J. McHugh, “A Cautionary Note On Image
Downgrading,” Proc. IEEE Eighth Ann. Computer Security
Applications Conf., IEEE Press, Piscataway, N.J., 1992

Websites:-
 http://www.jjtc.com/Steganography/
 http://azhar-paperpresentation.blogspot.in/2010/04/steganography-and-
digital-watermarking.html
THANK YOU