Packaging Inspiration: Al Qaeda’s Digital Magazine \u3cem\u3eInspire\u3c/em\u3e in the Self-Radicalization Process

Al Qaeda is today a fragmented organization, and its strategic communication efforts now focus largely on recruiting individuals in the West to carry out “individual jihad” in their home countries. One Al Qaeda–affiliated publication, Inspire, represents an unusual use of the digital magazine format and content for recruitment. This study examines the content and design of Inspire to determine how the magazine may advance the self-radicalization that it seeks to induce in its readers. This analysis finds that the magazine weaves together jihadist ideology, a narrow interpretation of Islam, and appropriations of Western popular culture to maximize the publication’s potential for motivating readers toward violence

Cryptanalysis of an MPEG-Video Encryption Scheme Based on Secret Huffman Tables

This paper studies the security of a recently-proposed MPEG-video encryption scheme based on secret Huffman tables. Our cryptanalysis shows that: 1) the key space of the encryption scheme is not sufficiently large against divide-and-conquer (DAC) attack and known-plaintext attack; 2) it is possible to decrypt a cipher-video with a partially-known key, thus dramatically reducing the complexity of the DAC brute-force attack in some cases; 3) its security against the chosen-plaintext attack is very weak. Some experimental results are included to support the cryptanalytic results with a brief discuss on how to improve this MPEG-video encryption scheme.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Digital multimedia archiving based on optimization steganography system

© 2014 IEEE. As soon as digital artifacts have become a part and parcel of everyday life, the need for digital media archives with the capacity of preserving the given metadata has risen impressively. The process of converting the digital metadata to archives, however, is fraught with a number of difficulties, the key one concerning the methodology for embedding high payload capacity information into the digital multimedia and at the same time retains high quality of the image. The given paper will consider steganography as a possible solution to the aforementioned issue. Allowing for detecting the genetic algorithm for boosting the PSNR value with the information of high capacity will help solve the issue regarding the digital multimedia archiving. Many sizes of data are embeded inside the images and the PSNR (Peak signal-to-noise ratio) is also taken for each of the images verified

Forensic Analysis of Android Steganography Apps

The processing power of smartphones supports steganographic algorithms that were considered to be too computationally intensive for handheld devices. Several steganography apps are now available on mobile phones to support covert communications using digital photographs. This chapter focuses on two key questions: How effectively can a steganography app be reverse engineered? How can this knowledge help improve the detection of steganographic images and other related files? Two Android steganography apps, PixelKnot and Da Vinci Secret Image, are analyzed. Experiments demonstrate that they are constructed in very different ways and provide different levels of security for hiding messages. The results of detecting steganography files, including images generated by the apps, using three software packages are presented. The results point to an urgent need for further research on reverse engineering steganography apps and detecting images produced by these apps

A New Approach For Image Hiding Based On Contourlet Transform

A new image hiding method based on the contourlet transform is proposed inthis paper. This strategy is based on storing information in high frequency subbands of contourlet transform. The embedding approach is in direction that the contourlet sub-bands have the least statistical disorder. As a result, the proposed algorithm has a higher robustness against to common steganalysis approaches. In addition, the quality of stegano image has considerably improved in comparison with related state of the art methods, with the extracted secret image having an acceptable quality. Furthermore, theexperimental results show robustness respect to Gaussian noise and otherattacks such as JPEG compression.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v2i5.143

Automatic region selection method to enhance image-based steganography

Image-based steganography is an essential procedure with several practical applications related to information security, user authentication, copyright protection, etc. However, most existing image-based steganographic techniques assume that the pixels that hide the data can be chosen freely, such as random pixel selection, without considering the contents of the input image. So, the “region of interest” such as human faces in the input image might have defected after data hiding even at a low inserting rate, and this will degrade the visual quality especially for the images containing several human faces. With this view, we proposed a novel approach that combines human skin-color detection along with the LSB approach which can choose the embedding regions. The idea behind that is based on the fact that the Human Vision System HVS tends to focus its attention on selectively certain structures of the visual scene instead of the whole image. Practically, human skin-color is good evidence of the existence of human targets in images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that employs skin detection in application to steganography which consider the contents of input image and consequently can choose the embedding regions. Moreover, an enhanced RSA algorithm and Elliptic Curve Equation are used to provide a double level of security. In addition, the system embeds noise bits into the resulting stego-image to make the attacker’s task more confusing. Two datasets are used for testing and evaluation. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves a significant security improvement with high image quality