A Novel Approach of Steganography using Bit plane Slicing and Catalan-Lucas Number Sequence

This paper represents a novel approach of steganography using ModifiedSteganographic algorithm with Catalan-Lucas Series. In this algorithm,Catalan Lucas number sequence represents each RBG component of the image by 16 bits instead of 8 bits. By applying Bit Plane Slicing technique, the cover image is sliced into 48 virtual planes and the message to be hidden is also sliced into 16 virtual planes. These 16 planes of the secret message are hidden into some of the 48 virtual planes of the cover image using the proposed algorithm. This process generates three keys at the sender which are required to extract the message from the stego image at the receiver. This method provides high data security and hiding capacity. The experimental results and the PSNR values are also discussed with the advantages from the security perspective

The Automation of the Extraction of Evidence masked by Steganographic Techniques in WAV and MP3 Audio Files

Antiforensics techniques and particularly steganography and cryptography have become increasingly pressing issues that affect the current digital forensics practice, both techniques are widely researched and developed as considered in the heart of the modern digital era but remain double edged swords standing between the privacy conscious and the criminally malicious, dependent on the severity of the methods deployed. This paper advances the automation of hidden evidence extraction in the context of audio files enabling the correlation between unprocessed evidence artefacts and extreme Steganographic and Cryptographic techniques using the Least Significant Bits extraction method (LSB). The research generates an in-depth review of current digital forensic toolkit and systems and formally address their capabilities in handling steganography-related cases, we opted for experimental research methodology in the form of quantitative analysis of the efficiency of detecting and extraction of hidden artefacts in WAV and MP3 audio files by comparing standard industry software. This work establishes an environment for the practical implementation and testing of the proposed approach and the new toolkit for extracting evidence hidden by Cryptographic and Steganographic techniques during forensics investigations. The proposed multi-approach automation demonstrated a huge positive impact in terms of efficiency and accuracy and notably on large audio files (MP3 and WAV) which the forensics analysis is time-consuming and requires significant computational resources and memory. However, the proposed automation may occasionally produce false positives (detecting steganography where none exists) or false negatives (failing to detect steganography that is present) but overall achieve a balance between detecting hidden data accurately along with minimising the false alarms.Comment: Wires Forensics Sciences Under Revie

Exploiting similarities between secret and cover images for improved embedding efficiency and security in digital steganography

The rapid advancements in digital communication technology and huge increase in computer power have generated an exponential growth in the use of the Internet for various commercial, governmental and social interactions that involve transmission of a variety of complex data and multimedia objects. Securing the content of sensitive as well as personal transactions over open networks while ensuring the privacy of information has become essential but increasingly challenging. Therefore, information and multimedia security research area attracts more and more interest, and its scope of applications expands significantly. Communication security mechanisms have been investigated and developed to protect information privacy with Encryption and Steganography providing the two most obvious solutions. Encrypting a secret message transforms it to a noise-like data which is observable but meaningless, while Steganography conceals the very existence of secret information by hiding in mundane communication that does not attract unwelcome snooping. Digital steganography is concerned with using images, videos and audio signals as cover objects for hiding secret bit-streams. Suitability of media files for such purposes is due to the high degree of redundancy as well as being the most widely exchanged digital data. Over the last two decades, there has been a plethora of research that aim to develop new hiding schemes to overcome the variety of challenges relating to imperceptibility of the hidden secrets, payload capacity, efficiency of embedding and robustness against steganalysis attacks. Most existing techniques treat secrets as random bit-streams even when dealing with non-random signals such as images that may add to the toughness of the challenges.This thesis is devoted to investigate and develop steganography schemes for embedding secret images in image files. While many existing schemes have been developed to perform well with respect to one or more of the above objectives, we aim to achieve optimal performance in terms of all these objectives. We shall only be concerned with embedding secret images in the spatial domain of cover images. The main difficulty in addressing the different challenges stems from the fact that the act of embedding results in changing cover image pixel values that cannot be avoided, although these changes may not be easy to detect by the human eye. These pixel changes is a consequence of dissimilarity between the cover LSB plane and the secretimage bit-stream, and result in changes to the statistical parameters of stego-image bit-planes as well as to local image features. Steganalysis tools exploit these effects to model targeted as well as blind attacks. These challenges are usually dealt with by randomising the changes to the LSB, using different/multiple bit-planes to embed one or more secret bits using elaborate schemes, or embedding in certain regions that are noise-tolerant. Our innovative approach to deal with these challenges is first to develop some image procedures and models that result in increasing similarity between the cover image LSB plane and the secret image bit-stream. This will be achieved in two novel steps involving manipulation of both the secret image and the cover image, prior to embedding, that result a higher 0:1 ratio in both the secret bit-stream and the cover pixels‘ LSB plane. For the secret images, we exploit the fact that image pixel values are in general neither uniformly distributed, as is the case of random secrets, nor spatially stationary. We shall develop three secret image pre-processing algorithms to transform the secret image bit-stream for increased 0:1 ratio. Two of these are similar, but one in the spatial domain and the other in the Wavelet domain. In both cases, the most frequent pixels are mapped onto bytes with more 0s. The third method, process blocks by subtracting their means from their pixel values and hence reducing the require number of bits to represent these blocks. In other words, this third algorithm also reduces the length of the secret image bit-stream without loss of information. We shall demonstrate that these algorithms yield a significant increase in the secret image bit-stream 0:1 ratio, the one that based on the Wavelet domain is the best-performing with 80% ratio.For the cover images, we exploit the fact that pixel value decomposition schemes, based on Fibonacci or other defining sequences that differ from the usual binary scheme, expand the number of bit-planes and thereby may help increase the 0:1 ratio in cover image LSB plane. We investigate some such existing techniques and demonstrate that these schemes indeed lead to increased 0:1 ratio in the corresponding cover image LSB plane. We also develop a new extension of the binary decomposition scheme that is the best-performing one with 77% ratio. We exploit the above two steps strategy to propose a bit-plane(s) mapping embedding technique, instead of bit-plane(s) replacement to make each cover pixel usable for secret embedding. This is motivated by the observation that non-binary pixel decomposition schemes also result in decreasing the number of possible patterns for the three first bit-planes to 4 or 5 instead of 8. We shall demonstrate that the combination of the mapping-based embedding scheme and the two steps strategy produces stego-images that have minimal distortion, i.e. reducing the number of the cover pixels changes after message embedding and increasing embedding efficiency. We shall also demonstrate that these schemes result in reasonable stego-image quality and are robust against all the targeted steganalysis tools but not against the blind SRM tool. We shall finally identify possible future work to achieve robustness against SRM at some payload rates and further improve stego-image quality

A Novel Hybrid Method for Effective Identification and Extraction of Digital Evidence Masked by Steganographic Techniques in WAV and MP3 Files

Anti-forensics techniques, particularly steganography and cryptography, have become increasingly pressing issues affecting current digital forensics practices. This paper advances the automation of hidden evidence extraction in audio files by proposing a novel multi-approach method. This method facilitates the correlation between unprocessed artefacts, indexed and live forensics analysis, and traditional steganographic and cryptographic detection techniques. In this work, we opted for experimental research methodology in the form of a quantitative analysis of the efficiency of the proposed automation in detecting and extracting hidden artefacts in WAV and MP3 audio files. This comparison is made against standard industry systems. This work advances the current automation in extracting evidence hidden by cryptographic and steganographic techniques during forensic investigations. The proposed multi-approach demonstrates a clear enhancement in terms of coverage and accuracy, notably on large audio files (MP3 and WAV), where manual forensic analysis is complex, time-consuming and requires significant expertise. Nonetheless, the proposed multi-approach automation may occasionally produce false positives (detecting steganography where none exists) or false negatives (failing to detect steganography that is present). However, it strikes a good balance between efficiently and effectively detecting hidden evidence, minimising false negatives and validating its reliability

A novel hybrid method for effective identification and extraction of digital evidence masked by steganographic techniques in WAV and MP3 files

Anti-forensics techniques, particularly steganography and cryptography, have become increasingly pressing issues affecting current digital forensics practices. This paper advances the automation of hidden evidence extraction in audio files by proposing a novel multi-approach method. This method facilitates the correlation between unprocessed artefacts, indexed and live forensics analysis, and traditional steganographic and cryp- tographic detection techniques. In this work, we opted for experimental research methodology in the form of a quantitative analysis of the efficiency of the proposed automation in detecting and extracting hidden artefacts in WAV and MP3 audio files. This comparison is made against standard industry systems. This work advances the current automation in extracting evidence hidden by cryptographic and steganographic techniques during forensic investigations. The proposed multi-approach demonstrates a clear enhancement in terms of cover- age and accuracy, notably on large audio files (MP3 and WAV), where manual forensic analysis is complex, time-consuming and requires significant expertise. Nonetheless, the proposed multi-approach automation may occasionally produce false positives (detecting steganography where none exists) or false negatives (failing to detect steganography that is present). However, it strikes a good balance between efficiently and effectively detecting hidden evidence, minimising false negatives and validating its reliability

[Primena Voronoi-Delone triangulacija i Katalanovih objekata u zaštiti podataka]: doktorske disertacije

This doctoral dissertation is in the field of computer geometry in combination with data protection methods, with an emphasis on the implementation of applications using object-oriented programming techniques. New methods for data protection using Voronoi - Delaunay triangulation were presented. The first method is based on 3D plane encryption in GIS. The second method is based on the authentication of users (clients) of banks, by encrypting the image using the incremental algorithm Voronoi - Delone triangulation and Catalan objects. The third method is the method of steganography, which is based on a combination of Catalan objects and Voronoi - Delone triangulation. The fourth method refers to the proposal of application of one algorithm of computer geometry in the procedure of generating Cryptographic keys from one segment of 3D image

Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Coherence for Video Object Detection in Robotics

This paper proposes a method to enhance video object detection for indoor environments in robotics. Concretely, it exploits knowledge about the camera motion between frames to propagate previously detected objects to successive frames. The proposal is rooted in the concepts of planar homography to propose regions of interest where to find objects, and recursive Bayesian filtering to integrate observations over time. The proposal is evaluated on six virtual, indoor environments, accounting for the detection of nine object classes over a total of ∼ 7k frames. Results show that our proposal improves the recall and the F1-score by a factor of 1.41 and 1.27, respectively, as well as it achieves a significant reduction of the object categorization entropy (58.8%) when compared to a two-stage video object detection method used as baseline, at the cost of small time overheads (120 ms) and precision loss (0.92).</p