Efficient And Robust Video Steganography Algorithms For Secure Data Communication

Nowadays, the science of information hiding has gained tremendous significance due to advances in information and communication technology. The performance of any steganography method relies on the imperceptibility, embedding capacity, and robustness against attacks. This research provides solutions for the existing video steganography problems by proposing new and effective methods for digital video steganography. The key objectives of our paper are as follows: 1) a highly secure video steganography algorithm based on error correcting codes (ECC); 2) an increased payload video steganography algorithm in the discrete wavelet domain based on ECC; 3) a novel video steganography algorithm based on Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) tracking and ECC; 4) a robust video steganography algorithm in the wavelet domain based on KLT tracking and ECC; and 5) a video steganography algorithm based on multiple object tracking and ECC. The experimental results from our research demonstrate that our proposed algorithms achieve higher embedding capacity as well as better imperceptibility of stego videos. Furthermore, the preprocessing stages increase the security and robustness of the proposed algorithms against attacks when compared to state-of-the-art steganographic methods

Application of Steganography for Anonymity through the Internet

In this paper, a novel steganographic scheme based on chaotic iterations is proposed. This research work takes place into the information hiding security framework. The applications for anonymity and privacy through the Internet are regarded too. To guarantee such an anonymity, it should be possible to set up a secret communication channel into a web page, being both secure and robust. To achieve this goal, we propose an information hiding scheme being stego-secure, which is the highest level of security in a well defined and studied category of attacks called "watermark-only attack". This category of attacks is the best context to study steganography-based anonymity through the Internet. The steganalysis of our steganographic process is also studied in order to show it security in a real test framework.Comment: 14 page

Perfectly Secure Steganography: Capacity, Error Exponents, and Code Constructions

An analysis of steganographic systems subject to the following perfect undetectability condition is presented in this paper. Following embedding of the message into the covertext, the resulting stegotext is required to have exactly the same probability distribution as the covertext. Then no statistical test can reliably detect the presence of the hidden message. We refer to such steganographic schemes as perfectly secure. A few such schemes have been proposed in recent literature, but they have vanishing rate. We prove that communication performance can potentially be vastly improved; specifically, our basic setup assumes independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) covertext, and we construct perfectly secure steganographic codes from public watermarking codes using binning methods and randomized permutations of the code. The permutation is a secret key shared between encoder and decoder. We derive (positive) capacity and random-coding exponents for perfectly-secure steganographic systems. The error exponents provide estimates of the code length required to achieve a target low error probability. We address the potential loss in communication performance due to the perfect-security requirement. This loss is the same as the loss obtained under a weaker order-1 steganographic requirement that would just require matching of first-order marginals of the covertext and stegotext distributions. Furthermore, no loss occurs if the covertext distribution is uniform and the distortion metric is cyclically symmetric; steganographic capacity is then achieved by randomized linear codes. Our framework may also be useful for developing computationally secure steganographic systems that have near-optimal communication performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, June 2008; ignore Version 2 as the file was corrupte

Steganography: a class of secure and robust algorithms

This research work presents a new class of non-blind information hiding algorithms that are stego-secure and robust. They are based on some finite domains iterations having the Devaney's topological chaos property. Thanks to a complete formalization of the approach we prove security against watermark-only attacks of a large class of steganographic algorithms. Finally a complete study of robustness is given in frequency DWT and DCT domains.Comment: Published in The Computer Journal special issue about steganograph

Perfectly Secure Steganography: Capacity, Error Exponents, and Code Constructions

An analysis of steganographic systems subject to the following perfect undetectability condition is presented in this paper. Following embedding of the message into the covertext, the resulting stegotext is required to have exactly the same probability distribution as the covertext. Then no statistical test can reliably detect the presence of the hidden message. We refer to such steganographic schemes as perfectly secure. A few such schemes have been proposed in recent literature, but they have vanishing rate. We prove that communication performance can potentially be vastly improved; specifically, our basic setup assumes independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) covertext, and we construct perfectly secure steganographic codes from public watermarking codes using binning methods and randomized permutations of the code. The permutation is a secret key shared between encoder and decoder. We derive (positive) capacity and random-coding exponents for perfectly-secure steganographic systems. The error exponents provide estimates of the code length required to achieve a target low error probability. We address the potential loss in communication performance due to the perfect-security requirement. This loss is the same as the loss obtained under a weaker order-1 steganographic requirement that would just require matching of first-order marginals of the covertext and stegotext distributions. Furthermore, no loss occurs if the covertext distribution is uniform and the distortion metric is cyclically symmetric; steganographic capacity is then achieved by randomized linear codes. Our framework may also be useful for developing computationally secure steganographic systems that have near-optimal communication performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, June 2008; ignore Version 2 as the file was corrupte

A novel steganography approach for audio files

We present a novel robust and secure steganography technique to hide images into audio files aiming at increasing the carrier medium capacity. The audio files are in the standard WAV format, which is based on the LSB algorithm while images are compressed by the GMPR technique which is based on the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and high frequency minimization encoding algorithm. The method involves compression-encryption of an image file by the GMPR technique followed by hiding it into audio data by appropriate bit substitution. The maximum number of bits without significant effect on audio signal for LSB audio steganography is 6 LSBs. The encrypted image bits are hidden into variable and multiple LSB layers in the proposed method. Experimental results from observed listening tests show that there is no significant difference between the stego audio reconstructed from the novel technique and the original signal. A performance evaluation has been carried out according to quality measurement criteria of Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR)