Chaotic iterations versus Spread-spectrum: chaos and stego security

A new framework for information hiding security, called chaos-security, has been proposed in a previous study. It is based on the evaluation of unpredictability of the scheme, whereas existing notions of security, as stego-security, are more linked to information leaks. It has been proven that spread-spectrum techniques, a well-known stego-secure scheme, are chaos-secure too. In this paper, the links between the two notions of security is deepened and the usability of chaos-security is clarified, by presenting a novel data hiding scheme that is twice stego and chaos-secure. This last scheme has better scores than spread-spectrum when evaluating qualitative and quantitative chaos-security properties. Incidentally, this result shows that the new framework for security tends to improve the ability to compare data hiding scheme

Application of Steganography for Anonymity through the Internet

In this paper, a novel steganographic scheme based on chaotic iterations is proposed. This research work takes place into the information hiding security framework. The applications for anonymity and privacy through the Internet are regarded too. To guarantee such an anonymity, it should be possible to set up a secret communication channel into a web page, being both secure and robust. To achieve this goal, we propose an information hiding scheme being stego-secure, which is the highest level of security in a well defined and studied category of attacks called "watermark-only attack". This category of attacks is the best context to study steganography-based anonymity through the Internet. The steganalysis of our steganographic process is also studied in order to show it security in a real test framework.Comment: 14 page

Watermarking security: theory and practice

This article proposes a theory of watermarking security based on a cryptanalysis point of view. The main idea is that information about the secret key leaks from the observations, for instance watermarked pieces of content, available to the opponent. Tools from information theory (Shannon's mutual information and Fisher's information matrix) can measure this leakage of information. The security level is then defined as the number of observations the attacker needs to successfully estimate the secret key. This theory is applied to two common watermarking methods: the substitutive scheme and the spread spectrum based techniques. Their security levels are calculated against three kinds of attack. The experimental work illustrates how Blind Source Separation (especially Independent Component Analysis) algorithms help the opponent exploiting this information leakage to disclose the secret carriers in the spread spectrum case. Simulations assess the security levels derived in the theoretical part of the article

Steganography: a class of secure and robust algorithms

This research work presents a new class of non-blind information hiding algorithms that are stego-secure and robust. They are based on some finite domains iterations having the Devaney's topological chaos property. Thanks to a complete formalization of the approach we prove security against watermark-only attacks of a large class of steganographic algorithms. Finally a complete study of robustness is given in frequency DWT and DCT domains.Comment: Published in The Computer Journal special issue about steganograph

Watermarking security part I: theory

This article proposes a theory of watermarking security based on a cryptanalysis point of view. The main idea is that information about the secret key leaks from the observations, for instance watermarked pieces of content, available to the opponent. Tools from information theory (Shannon's mutual information and Fisher's information matrix) can measure this leakage of information. The security level is then defined as the number of observations the attacker needs to successfully estimate the secret key. This theory is applied to common watermarking methods: the substitutive scheme and spread spectrum based techniques. Their security levels are calculated against three kinds of attack

A new secure process for steganography: CI2. Stego and topological security

International audienceIn this paper is proposed a novel steganographic scheme based on chaotic iterations which offer a solution facing the main limitation of the previous one. This research work takes place into the information hiding security fields. We show that the proposed scheme is stego-secure, which is the highest level of security in a well defined and studied category of attack called "watermark-only attack". Additionally, we prove that this scheme presents topological properties so that it is one of the firsts able to face, at least partially, an adversary when considering the others categories of attacks defined in the literature

Chaotic Iterations for Steganography - Stego-security and chaos-security

International audienceChaotic neural networks have received a great deal of attention these last years. In this paper we establish a precise correspondence between the so-called chaotic iterations and a particular class of artificial neural networks: global recurrent multi-layer perceptrons. We show formally that it is possible to make these iterations behave chaotically, as defined by Devaney, and thus we obtain the first neural networks proven chaotic. Several neural networks with different architectures are trained to exhibit a chaotical behavior