Survey of the Use of Steganography over the Internet

This paper addressesthe use of Steganography over the Internet by terrorists. There were ru-mors in the newspapers that Steganography is being used to covert communication between terrorists, without presenting any scientific proof. Niels Provos and Peter Honeyman conducted an extensive Internet search where they analyzed over 2 million images and didn’t find a single hidden image. After this study the scientific community was divided: some believed that Niels Provos and Peter Honeyman was conclusive enough other did not. This paper describes what Steganography is and what can be used for, various Steganography techniques and also presents the studies made regarding the use of Steganography on the Internet.Steganography, Secret Communication, Information Hiding, Cryptography

Compression Technique Using DCT & Fractal Compression: A Survey

Steganography differs from digital watermarking because both the information and the very existence of the information are hidden. In the beginning, the fractal image compression method is used to compress the secret image, and then we encrypt this compressed data by DES.The Existing Steganographic approaches are unable to handle the Subterfuge attack i.e, they cannot deal with the opponents not only detects a message ,but also render it useless, or even worse, modify it to opponent favor. The advantage of BCBS is the decoding can be operated without access to the cover image and it also detects if the message has been tampered without using any extra error correction. To improve the imperceptibility of the BCBS, DCT is used in combination to transfer stego-image from spatial domain to the frequency domain. The hiding capacity of the information is improved by introducing Fractal Compression and the security is enhanced using by encrypting stego-image using DES.  Copyright © www.iiste.org Keywords: Steganography, data hiding, fractal image compression, DCT

Avoiding Spoilers on Mediawiki Fan Sites Using Memento

A variety of fan-based wikis about episodic fiction (e.g., television shows, novels, movies) exist on the World Wide Web. These wikis provide a wealth of information about complex stories, but if readers are behind in their viewing they run the risk of encountering spoilers -- information that gives away key plot points before the intended time of the show\u27s writers. Enterprising readers might browse the wiki in a web archive so as to view the page prior to a specific episode date and thereby avoid spoilers. Unfortunately, due to how web archives choose the best page, it is still possible to see spoilers (especially in sparse archives). In this paper we discuss how to use Memento to avoid spoilers. Memento uses TimeGates to determine which best archived page to give back to the user, currently using a minimum distance heuristic. We quantify how this heuristic is inadequate for avoiding spoilers, analyzing data collected from fan wikis and the Internet Archive. We create an algorithm for calculating the probability of encountering a spoiler in a given wiki article. We conduct an experiment with 16 wiki sites for popular television shows. We find that 38% of those pages are unavailable in the Internet Archive. We find that when accessing fan wiki pages in the Internet Archive there is as much as a 66% chance of encountering a spoiler. Using sample access logs from the Internet Archive, we find that 19% of actual requests to the Wayback Machine for wikia.com pages ended in spoilers. We suggest the use of a different minimum distance heuristic, minpast, for wikis, using the desired datetime as an upper bound. Finally, we highlight the use of an extension for MediaWiki that utilizes this new heuristic and can be used to avoid spoilers. An unexpected revelation about Memento comes from the development of this extension. It turns out that an optimized two request-response Memento pattern for interacting with TimeGates does not perform well with MediaWiki, leading us to fall back to the original Memento pattern of three request-response pairs. We also conduct performance testing on the extension and show that it has a minimal impact on MediaWiki\u27s performance

Digital Rights Management: Improving Online Digital Images Copy Rights Management through an Enhanced Least Significant Bit Steganographic Algorithm

Digital media no doubt presents numerous advantages compared to the traditional analog media. Of the most importance is the fact that digital content (images, graphics, audio and video) can be easily copied, transmitted, retrieved and distributed over private and open access networks. The global availability of the internet- certainly the most impactful information exchange tool today- plus the numerous file sharing tools freely available have made the distribution of copyrighted digital media files simple and straightforward. Duplication of exact copies of original images, for example can be easily done and circulated without authentication. As much as this is an advantage in trying to enhance sharing of information, it certainly creates problems of ownership and authenticity and digital rights protection. There already exists copyright laws that provide for protection of all online content but the task of continuously guarding the web and correctly identifying those that infringe against these laws is increasingly becoming enormous. There is therefore need to continuously invest in development of new technologies and algorithms that will make it more and more difficult to illegally copy or use someone else content. To improve security of copyrighted online digital images, this paper proposes the use of an enhanced LSB steganographic algorithm that employs a selective and randomized approach in picking specific number of target image bits to swap with the owners signature authentication bits using a pseudo random number generator (PRNG). The carefully selected password seed is used to determine the set of selected numbers used for targeting specific image bits for the signature hiding. An experimental design is setup to determine the effectiveness of the method by comparing and analyzing the stego images’ statistical characteristics and the ability of steganalysis methods to detect the hidden signature. The experimental results indicate improved levels of imperceptibility and hence improved security against illegal copying. Keywords: Digital Media, Steganography, Copyright, Steganalysis, Stego image, imperceptibilit

Patient-Specific Prosthetic Fingers by Remote Collaboration - A Case Study

The concealment of amputation through prosthesis usage can shield an amputee from social stigma and help improve the emotional healing process especially at the early stages of hand or finger loss. However, the traditional techniques in prosthesis fabrication defy this as the patients need numerous visits to the clinics for measurements, fitting and follow-ups. This paper presents a method for constructing a prosthetic finger through online collaboration with the designer. The main input from the amputee comes from the Computer Tomography (CT) data in the region of the affected and the non-affected fingers. These data are sent over the internet and the prosthesis is constructed using visualization, computer-aided design and manufacturing tools. The finished product is then shipped to the patient. A case study with a single patient having an amputated ring finger at the proximal interphalangeal joint shows that the proposed method has a potential to address the patient's psychosocial concerns and minimize the exposure of the finger loss to the public.Comment: Open Access articl

An enhanced Least Significant Bit Steganographic Method for Information Hiding

The least significant bit (LSB) insertion method is a simple steganographic algorithm that takes the least significant bit in some bytes of the cover medium and swaps them with a sequence of bytes containing the secret data in order to conceal the information in the cover medium. However its imperceptibility and hiding capacity are relatively low. This is as revealed by the statistical characteristics of its resultant stego images compared to the original cover images. To increase the level of imperceptibility and the hiding capacity in the LSB insertion method, this research proposes an enhanced LSB method that employs a selective and randomized approach in picking specific number of target image bits to swap with the secret data bits during the embedding process. To facilitate the selective picking of the target image bits, the standard minimal linear congruential number generator (LCG) is used. The message digest (digital signature) of a user supplied password is used to seed the LCG and to extract the message from the cover medium. In measuring the effectiveness of the proposed method, the study adopted an experimental research design where the statistical characteristics of the proposed method stego images were compared with those of the traditional LSB method in a comparative experiment designed to establish the levels of image distortion (noise) introduced in the original cover image when either of the methods is used under the same payload and image. The experiment results indicated improved levels of imperceptibility and hiding capacity in the proposed method. Key Words: Steganography, Steganalysis, Stego image, payload, imperceptibilit

Robo-line storage: Low latency, high capacity storage systems over geographically distributed networks

Rapid advances in high performance computing are making possible more complete and accurate computer-based modeling of complex physical phenomena, such as weather front interactions, dynamics of chemical reactions, numerical aerodynamic analysis of airframes, and ocean-land-atmosphere interactions. Many of these 'grand challenge' applications are as demanding of the underlying storage system, in terms of their capacity and bandwidth requirements, as they are on the computational power of the processor. A global view of the Earth's ocean chlorophyll and land vegetation requires over 2 terabytes of raw satellite image data. In this paper, we describe our planned research program in high capacity, high bandwidth storage systems. The project has four overall goals. First, we will examine new methods for high capacity storage systems, made possible by low cost, small form factor magnetic and optical tape systems. Second, access to the storage system will be low latency and high bandwidth. To achieve this, we must interleave data transfer at all levels of the storage system, including devices, controllers, servers, and communications links. Latency will be reduced by extensive caching throughout the storage hierarchy. Third, we will provide effective management of a storage hierarchy, extending the techniques already developed for the Log Structured File System. Finally, we will construct a protototype high capacity file server, suitable for use on the National Research and Education Network (NREN). Such research must be a Cornerstone of any coherent program in high performance computing and communications

A Review on Image mosaicing for secure Transmission of University Exam Question Paper

The rapid spread of the digital world nowadays which is powered by ever faster system demands greater speed and security. Real time to secure an image is a challenging task due to the processing time and computational requirement for RGB image. So, to cope with these concerns, many innovative techniques of image processing for data hiding are required. In this paper new data hiding scheme is proposed which is known as image mosaicing. Image mosaicing is the process of merging split images to produce a single and complete image of the document. For this technique two input images are required one is secret image and second is target image, by merging these two a new image is made called as a mosaic image. So, the creation of mosaic image and lossless recovery of secret input image for question paper security is presented in this paper