Is ensemble classifier needed for steganalysis in high-dimensional feature spaces?

International audienceThe ensemble classifier, based on Fisher Linear Discriminant base learners, was introduced specifically for steganalysis of digital media, which currently uses high-dimensional feature spaces. Presently it is probably the most used method to design supervised classifier for steganalysis of digital images because of its good detection accuracy and small computational cost. It has been assumed by the community that the classifier implements a non-linear boundary through pooling binary decision of individual classifiers within the ensemble. This paper challenges this assumption by showing that linear classifier obtained by various regularizations of the FLD can perform equally well as the ensemble. Moreover it demonstrates that using state of the art solvers linear classifiers can be trained more efficiently and offer certain potential advantages over the original ensemble leading to much lower computational complexity than the ensemble classifier. All claims are supported experimentally on a wide spectrum of stego schemes operating in both the spatial and JPEG domains with a multitude of rich steganalysis feature sets

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

HUBFIRE - A multi-class SVM based JPEG steganalysis using HBCL statistics and FR Index

Blind Steganalysis attempts to detect steganographic data without prior knowledge of either the embedding algorithm or the 'cover' image. This paper proposes new features for JPEG blind steganalysis using a combination of Huffman Bit Code Length (HBCL) Statistics and File size to Resolution ratio (FR Index); the Huffman Bit File Index Resolution (HUBFIRE) algorithm proposed uses these functionals to build the classifier using a multi-class Support Vector Machine (SVM). JPEG images spanning a wide range of resolutions are used to create a 'stego-image' database employing three embedding schemes - the advanced Least Significant Bit encoding technique, that embeds in the spatial domain, a transform-domain embedding scheme: JPEG Hide-and-Seek and Model Based Steganography which employs an adaptive embedding technique. This work employs a multi-class SVM over the proposed 'HUBFIRE' algorithm for statistical steganalysis, which is not yet explored by steganalysts. Experiments conducted prove the model's accuracy over a wide range of payloads and embedding schemes

Preserve Imperceptibility and Robustness Performance on Steganography Technique based on StegaSVM-Shifted LBS Model

In image steganography, the most popular and widely used techniques is the least significant bit (LSB) that hide data into a cover-image in a spatial and discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain as well.Beside the LSB technique, there is other technique that is also influential i.e support vector machine (SVM) normally used to strengthen the embedding algorithm.Whatever techniques used in the image steganography field,the main purpose is to keep the existence of the secret-message secret.This paper designing the new model is proposed called StegaSVM-Shifted LSB model in DCT domain to preserve the imperceptibility and increase the robustness of stego-images.The StegaSVM-Shifted LSB model that has been proposed that utilize HVS and embedding technique through Shifted LSB showed a good performance

Steganography and Steganalysis in Digital Multimedia: Hype or Hallelujah?

In this tutorial, we introduce the basic theory behind Steganography and Steganalysis, and present some recent algorithms and developments of these fields. We show how the existing techniques used nowadays are related to Image Processing and Computer Vision, point out several trendy applications of Steganography and Steganalysis, and list a few great research opportunities just waiting to be addressed.In this tutorial, we introduce the basic theory behind Steganography and Steganalysis, and present some recent algorithms and developments of these fields. We show how the existing techniques used nowadays are related to Image Processing and Computer Vision, point out several trendy applications of Steganography and Steganalysis, and list a few great research opportunities just waiting to be addressed

Towards private and robust machine learning for information security

Many problems in information security are pattern recognition problems. For example, determining if a digital communication can be trusted amounts to certifying that the communication does not carry malicious or secret content, which can be distilled into the problem of recognising the difference between benign and malicious content. At a high level, machine learning is the study of how patterns are formed within data, and how learning these patterns generalises beyond the potentially limited data pool at a practitioner’s disposal, and so has become a powerful tool in information security. In this work, we study the benefits machine learning can bring to two problems in information security. Firstly, we show that machine learning can be used to detect which websites are visited by an internet user over an encrypted connection. By analysing timing and packet size information of encrypted network traffic, we train a machine learning model that predicts the target website given a stream of encrypted network traffic, even if browsing is performed over an anonymous communication network. Secondly, in addition to studying how machine learning can be used to design attacks, we study how it can be used to solve the problem of hiding information within a cover medium, such as an image or an audio recording, which is commonly referred to as steganography. How well an algorithm can hide information within a cover medium amounts to how well the algorithm models and exploits areas of redundancy. This can again be reduced to a pattern recognition problem, and so we apply machine learning to design a steganographic algorithm that efficiently hides a secret message with an image. Following this, we proceed with discussions surrounding why machine learning is not a panacea for information security, and can be an attack vector in and of itself. We show that machine learning can leak private and sensitive information about the data it used to learn, and how malicious actors can exploit vulnerabilities in these learning algorithms to compel them to exhibit adversarial behaviours. Finally, we examine the problem of the disconnect between image recognition systems learned by humans and by machine learning models. While human classification of an image is relatively robust to noise, machine learning models do not possess this property. We show how an attacker can cause targeted misclassifications against an entire data distribution by exploiting this property, and go onto introduce a mitigation that ameliorates this undesirable trait of machine learning