Using Transcoding for Hidden Communication in IP Telephony

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. At this step the original voice payload size is intentionally unaltered and the change of the codec is not indicated. Instead, after placing the transcoded voice payload, the remaining free space is filled with hidden data. TranSteg proof of concept implementation was designed and developed. The obtained experimental results are enclosed in this paper. They prove that the proposed method is feasible and offers a high steganographic bandwidth. TranSteg detection is difficult to perform when performing inspection in a single network localisation.Comment: 17 pages, 16 figures, 4 table

Recent Advances in Steganography

Steganography is the art and science of communicating which hides the existence of the communication. Steganographic technologies are an important part of the future of Internet security and privacy on open systems such as the Internet. This book's focus is on a relatively new field of study in Steganography and it takes a look at this technology by introducing the readers various concepts of Steganography and Steganalysis. The book has a brief history of steganography and it surveys steganalysis methods considering their modeling techniques. Some new steganography techniques for hiding secret data in images are presented. Furthermore, steganography in speeches is reviewed, and a new approach for hiding data in speeches is introduced

Steganography in inactive frames of VoIP streams encoded by source codec

This paper describes a novel high capacity steganography algorithm for embedding data in the inactive frames of low bit rate audio streams encoded by G.723.1 source codec, which is used extensively in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). This study reveals that, contrary to existing thoughts, the inactive frames of VoIP streams are more suitable for data embedding than the active frames of the streams, that is, steganography in the inactive audio frames attains a larger data embedding capacity than that in the active audio frames under the same imperceptibility. By analysing the concealment of steganography in the inactive frames of low bit rate audio streams encoded by G.723.1 codec with 6.3kbps, the authors propose a new algorithm for steganography in different speech parameters of the inactive frames. Performance evaluation shows embedding data in various speech parameters led to different levels of concealment. An improved voice activity detection algorithm is suggested for detecting inactive audio frames taking into packet loss account. Experimental results show our proposed steganography algorithm not only achieved perfect imperceptibility but also gained a high data embedding rate up to 101 bits/frame, indicating that the data embedding capacity of the proposed algorithm is very much larger than those of previously suggested algorithms

Covert voice over internet protocol communications with packet loss based on fractal interpolation

The last few years have witnessed an explosive growth in the research of information hiding in multimedia objects, but few studies have taken into account packet loss in multimedia networks. As one of the most popular real-time services in the Internet, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) contributes to a large part of network traffic for its advantages of real time, high flow, and low cost. So packet loss is inevitable in multimedia networks and affects the performance of VoIP communications. In this study, a fractal-based VoIP steganographic approach was proposed to realise covert VoIP communications in the presence of packet loss. In the proposed scheme, secret data to be hidden were divided into blocks after being encrypted with the block cipher, and each block of the secret data was then embedded into VoIP streaming packets. The VoIP packets went through a packet loss system based on Gilbert model which simulates a real network situation. And a prediction model based on fractal interpolation was built to decide whether a VoIP packet was suitable for data hiding. The experimental results indicated that the speech quality degradation increased with the escalating packet-loss level. The average variance of speech quality metrics (PESQ score) between the "no-embedding" speech samples and the “with-embedding” stego-speech samples was about 0.717, and the variances narrowed with the increasing packet-loss level. Both the average PESQ scores and the SNR values of stego-speech samples and the data retrieving rates had almost the same varying trends when the packet-loss level increased, indicating that the success rate of the fractal prediction model played an important role in the performance of covert VoIP communications

An improved security and message capacity using AES and Huffman coding on image steganography

Information security is very important and has been widely implemented. Cryptography and steganography are two common methods that can be implemented to secure and conceal the information. In this research, the proposed AES algorithm for cryptography and DWT for steganography. However, in case of implementing DWT as steganography, there is a weakness which is a lower capacity. Based on DWT’s problem, proposed Huffman Coding to reduce the total of the message’s bit and increase the capacity. In the implementation, a message will be processed by using AES and compressed by using Huffman Coding then conceal in a cover using DWT. After doing several experiments using a 128x128 pixel message image and a 512x512 pixel of the cover image, achieved the average of MSE is 1.5676 and the average of PSNR result is above 40db which is 46.1878

Covert Voice over Internet Protocol communications based on spatial model

This paper presents a new spatial steganography model for covert communications over Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), providing a solution to the issue of increasing the capacity of covert VoIP channels without compromising the imperceptibility of the channels. Drawing from Orthogonal Modulation Theory in communications, the model introduced two concepts, orthogonal data hiding features and data hiding vectors, to covert VoIP communications. By taking into account the variation characteristics of VoIP audio streams in the time domain, a hiding vector negotiation mechanism was suggested to achieve dynamic self-adaptive ste-ganography in media streams. Experimental results on VoIP steganography show that the pro-posed steganographic method effectively depicted the spatial and temporal characteristics of VoIP audio streams, and enhanced robustness against detection of steganalysis tools, thereby improving the security of covert VoIP communications