Data Hiding and Its Applications

Data hiding techniques have been widely used to provide copyright protection, data integrity, covert communication, non-repudiation, and authentication, among other applications. In the context of the increased dissemination and distribution of multimedia content over the internet, data hiding methods, such as digital watermarking and steganography, are becoming increasingly relevant in providing multimedia security. The goal of this book is to focus on the improvement of data hiding algorithms and their different applications (both traditional and emerging), bringing together researchers and practitioners from different research fields, including data hiding, signal processing, cryptography, and information theory, among others

Prediction-error of Prediction Error (PPE)-based Reversible Data Hiding

This paper presents a novel reversible data hiding (RDH) algorithm for gray-scaled images, in which the prediction-error of prediction error (PPE) of a pixel is used to carry the secret data. In the proposed method, the pixels to be embedded are firstly predicted with their neighboring pixels to obtain the corresponding prediction errors (PEs). Then, by exploiting the PEs of the neighboring pixels, the prediction of the PEs of the pixels can be determined. And, a sorting technique based on the local complexity of a pixel is used to collect the PPEs to generate an ordered PPE sequence so that, smaller PPEs will be processed first for data embedding. By reversibly shifting the PPE histogram (PPEH) with optimized parameters, the pixels corresponding to the altered PPEH bins can be finally modified to carry the secret data. Experimental results have implied that the proposed method can benefit from the prediction procedure of the PEs, sorting technique as well as parameters selection, and therefore outperform some state-of-the-art works in terms of payload-distortion performance when applied to different images.Comment: There has no technical difference to previous versions, but rather some minor word corrections. A 2-page summary of this paper was accepted by ACM IH&MMSec'16 "Ongoing work session". My homepage: hzwu.github.i

Steganalytic Methods for the Detection of Histogram Shifting Data Hiding Schemes

Peer-reviewedIn this paper, several steganalytic techniques designed to detect the existence of hidden messages using histogram shifting schemes are presented. Firstly, three techniques to identify specific histogram shifting data hiding schemes, based on detectable visible alterations on the histogram or abnormal statistical distributions, are suggested. Afterwards, a general technique capable of detecting all the analyzed histogram shifting data hiding methods is suggested. This technique is based on the effect of histogram shifting methods on the ¿volatility¿ of the histogram of the difference image. The different behavior of volatility whenever new data are hidden makes it possible to identify stego and cover images

Secure digital documents using Steganography and QR Code

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonWith the increasing use of the Internet several problems have arisen regarding the processing of electronic documents. These include content filtering, content retrieval/search. Moreover, document security has taken a centre stage including copyright protection, broadcast monitoring etc. There is an acute need of an effective tool which can find the identity, location and the time when the document was created so that it can be determined whether or not the contents of the document were tampered with after creation. Owing the sensitivity of the large amounts of data which is processed on a daily basis, verifying the authenticity and integrity of a document is more important now than it ever was. Unsurprisingly document authenticity verification has become the centre of attention in the world of research. Consequently, this research is concerned with creating a tool which deals with the above problem. This research proposes the use of a Quick Response Code as a message carrier for Text Key-print. The Text Key-print is a novel method which employs the basic element of the language (i.e. Characters of the alphabet) in order to achieve authenticity of electronic documents through the transformation of its physical structure into a logical structured relationship. The resultant dimensional matrix is then converted into a binary stream and encapsulated with a serial number or URL inside a Quick response Code (QR code) to form a digital fingerprint mark. For hiding a QR code, two image steganography techniques were developed based upon the spatial and the transform domains. In the spatial domain, three methods were proposed and implemented based on the least significant bit insertion technique and the use of pseudorandom number generator to scatter the message into a set of arbitrary pixels. These methods utilise the three colour channels in the images based on the RGB model based in order to embed one, two or three bits per the eight bit channel which results in three different hiding capacities. The second technique is an adaptive approach in transforming domain where a threshold value is calculated under a predefined location for embedding in order to identify the embedding strength of the embedding technique. The quality of the generated stego images was evaluated using both objective (PSNR) and Subjective (DSCQS) methods to ensure the reliability of our proposed methods. The experimental results revealed that PSNR is not a strong indicator of the perceived stego image quality, but not a bad interpreter also of the actual quality of stego images. Since the visual difference between the cover and the stego image must be absolutely imperceptible to the human visual system, it was logically convenient to ask human observers with different qualifications and experience in the field of image processing to evaluate the perceived quality of the cover and the stego image. Thus, the subjective responses were analysed using statistical measurements to describe the distribution of the scores given by the assessors. Thus, the proposed scheme presents an alternative approach to protect digital documents rather than the traditional techniques of digital signature and watermarking

Detection and Mitigation of Steganographic Malware

A new attack trend concerns the use of some form of steganography and information hiding to make malware stealthier and able to elude many standard security mechanisms. Therefore, this Thesis addresses the detection and the mitigation of this class of threats. In particular, it considers malware implementing covert communications within network traffic or cloaking malicious payloads within digital images. The first research contribution of this Thesis is in the detection of network covert channels. Unfortunately, the literature on the topic lacks of real traffic traces or attack samples to perform precise tests or security assessments. Thus, a propaedeutic research activity has been devoted to develop two ad-hoc tools. The first allows to create covert channels targeting the IPv6 protocol by eavesdropping flows, whereas the second allows to embed secret data within arbitrary traffic traces that can be replayed to perform investigations in realistic conditions. This Thesis then starts with a security assessment concerning the impact of hidden network communications in production-quality scenarios. Results have been obtained by considering channels cloaking data in the most popular protocols (e.g., TLS, IPv4/v6, and ICMPv4/v6) and showcased that de-facto standard intrusion detection systems and firewalls (i.e., Snort, Suricata, and Zeek) are unable to spot this class of hazards. Since malware can conceal information (e.g., commands and configuration files) in almost every protocol, traffic feature or network element, configuring or adapting pre-existent security solutions could be not straightforward. Moreover, inspecting multiple protocols, fields or conversations at the same time could lead to performance issues. Thus, a major effort has been devoted to develop a suite based on the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) to gain visibility over different network protocols/components and to efficiently collect various performance indicators or statistics by using a unique technology. This part of research allowed to spot the presence of network covert channels targeting the header of the IPv6 protocol or the inter-packet time of generic network conversations. In addition, the approach based on eBPF turned out to be very flexible and also allowed to reveal hidden data transfers between two processes co-located within the same host. Another important contribution of this part of the Thesis concerns the deployment of the suite in realistic scenarios and its comparison with other similar tools. Specifically, a thorough performance evaluation demonstrated that eBPF can be used to inspect traffic and reveal the presence of covert communications also when in the presence of high loads, e.g., it can sustain rates up to 3 Gbit/s with commodity hardware. To further address the problem of revealing network covert channels in realistic environments, this Thesis also investigates malware targeting traffic generated by Internet of Things devices. In this case, an incremental ensemble of autoencoders has been considered to face the ''unknown'' location of the hidden data generated by a threat covertly exchanging commands towards a remote attacker. The second research contribution of this Thesis is in the detection of malicious payloads hidden within digital images. In fact, the majority of real-world malware exploits hiding methods based on Least Significant Bit steganography and some of its variants, such as the Invoke-PSImage mechanism. Therefore, a relevant amount of research has been done to detect the presence of hidden data and classify the payload (e.g., malicious PowerShell scripts or PHP fragments). To this aim, mechanisms leveraging Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) proved to be flexible and effective since they can learn by combining raw low-level data and can be updated or retrained to consider unseen payloads or images with different features. To take into account realistic threat models, this Thesis studies malware targeting different types of images (i.e., favicons and icons) and various payloads (e.g., URLs and Ethereum addresses, as well as webshells). Obtained results showcased that DNNs can be considered a valid tool for spotting the presence of hidden contents since their detection accuracy is always above 90% also when facing ''elusion'' mechanisms such as basic obfuscation techniques or alternative encoding schemes. Lastly, when detection or classification are not possible (e.g., due to resource constraints), approaches enforcing ''sanitization'' can be applied. Thus, this Thesis also considers autoencoders able to disrupt hidden malicious contents without degrading the quality of the image

인공지능 보안

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 자연과학대학 협동과정 생물정보학전공, 2021. 2. 윤성로.With the development of machine learning (ML), expectations for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have increased daily. In particular, deep neural networks have demonstrated outstanding performance in many fields. However, if a deep-learning (DL) model causes mispredictions or misclassifications, it can cause difficulty, owing to malicious external influences. This dissertation discusses DL security and privacy issues and proposes methodologies for security and privacy attacks. First, we reviewed security attacks and defenses from two aspects. Evasion attacks use adversarial examples to disrupt the classification process, and poisoning attacks compromise training by compromising the training data. Next, we reviewed attacks on privacy that can exploit exposed training data and defenses, including differential privacy and encryption. For adversarial DL, we study the problem of finding adversarial examples against ML-based portable document format (PDF) malware classifiers. We believe that our problem is more challenging than those against ML models for image processing, owing to the highly complex data structure of PDFs, compared with traditional image datasets, and the requirement that the infected PDF should exhibit malicious behavior without being detected. We propose an attack using generative adversarial networks that effectively generates evasive PDFs using a variational autoencoder robust against adversarial examples. For privacy in DL, we study the problem of avoiding sensitive data being misused and propose a privacy-preserving framework for deep neural networks. Our methods are based on generative models that preserve the privacy of sensitive data while maintaining a high prediction performance. Finally, we study the security aspect in biological domains to detect maliciousness in deoxyribonucleic acid sequences and watermarks to protect intellectual properties. In summary, the proposed DL models for security and privacy embrace a diversity of research by attempting actual attacks and defenses in various fields.인공지능 모델을 사용하기 위해서는 개인별 데이터 수집이 필수적이다. 반면 개인의 민감한 데이터가 유출되는 경우에는 프라이버시 침해의 소지가 있다. 인공지능 모델을 사용하는데 수집된 데이터가 외부에 유출되지 않도록 하거나, 익명화, 부호화 등의 보안 기법을 인공지능 모델에 적용하는 분야를 Private AI로 분류할 수 있다. 또한 인공지능 모델이 노출될 경우 지적 소유권이 무력화될 수 있는 문제점과, 악의적인 학습 데이터를 이용하여 인공지능 시스템을 오작동할 수 있고 이러한 인공지능 모델 자체에 대한 위협은 Secure AI로 분류할 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 학습 데이터에 대한 공격을 기반으로 신경망의 결손 사례를 보여준다. 기존의 AEs 연구들은 이미지를 기반으로 많은 연구가 진행되었다. 보다 복잡한 heterogenous한 PDF 데이터로 연구를 확장하여 generative 기반의 모델을 제안하여 공격 샘플을 생성하였다. 다음으로 이상 패턴을 보이는 샘플을 검출할 수 있는 DNA steganalysis 방어 모델을 제안한다. 마지막으로 개인 정보 보호를 위해 generative 모델 기반의 익명화 기법들을 제안한다. 요약하면 본 논문은 인공지능 모델을 활용한 공격 및 방어 알고리즘과 신경망을 활용하는데 발생되는 프라이버시 이슈를 해결할 수 있는 기계학습 알고리즘에 기반한 일련의 방법론을 제안한다.Abstract i List of Figures vi List of Tables xiii 1 Introduction 1 2 Background 6 2.1 Deep Learning: a brief overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.2 Security Attacks on Deep Learning Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.2.1 Evasion Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.2.2 Poisoning Attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 2.3 Defense Techniques Against Deep Learning Models . . . . . . . . . 26 2.3.1 Defense Techniques against Evasion Attacks . . . . . . . . 27 2.3.2 Defense against Poisoning Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 2.4 Privacy issues on Deep Learning Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 2.4.1 Attacks on Privacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 2.4.2 Defenses Against Attacks on Privacy . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 3 Attacks on Deep Learning Models 47 3.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 3.1.1 Threat Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 3.1.2 Portable Document Format (PDF) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 3.1.3 PDF Malware Classifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 3.1.4 Evasion Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 3.2 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 3.2.1 Feature Extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 3.2.2 Feature Selection Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 3.2.3 Seed Selection for Mutation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 3.2.4 Evading Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 3.2.5 Model architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 3.2.6 PDF Repacking and Verification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 3.3 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 3.3.1 Datasets and Model Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 3.3.2 Target Classifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 3.3.3 CVEs for Various Types of PDF Malware . . . . . . . . . . 72 3.3.4 Malicious Signature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 3.3.5 AntiVirus Engines (VirusTotal) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 3.3.6 Feature Mutation Result for Contagio . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 3.3.7 Feature Mutation Result for CVEs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 3.3.8 Malicious Signature Verification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 3.3.9 Evasion Speed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 3.3.10 AntiVirus Engines (VirusTotal) Result . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 3.4 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 4 Defense on Deep Learning Models 88 4.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 4.1.1 Message-Hiding Regions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 4.1.2 DNA Steganography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 4.1.3 Example of Message Hiding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 4.1.4 DNA Steganalysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 4.2 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 4.2.1 Notations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 4.2.2 Proposed Model Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 4.3 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 4.3.1 Experiment Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 4.3.2 Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 4.3.3 Dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 4.3.4 Model Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 4.3.5 Message Hiding Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 4.3.6 Evaluation Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 4.3.7 Performance Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 4.3.8 Analyzing Malicious Code in DNA Sequences . . . . . . . 112 4.4 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 5 Privacy: Generative Models for Anonymizing Private Data 115 5.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 5.1.1 Notations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 5.1.2 Anonymization using GANs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 5.1.3 Security Principle of Anonymized GANs . . . . . . . . . . 123 5.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 5.2.1 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 5.2.2 Target Classifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 5.2.3 Model Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 5.2.4 Evaluation Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 5.2.5 Comparison to Differential Privacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 5.2.6 Performance Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 5.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 6 Privacy: Privacy-preserving Inference for Deep Learning Models 132 6.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 6.1.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 6.1.2 Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 6.1.3 Deep Private Generation Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 6.1.4 Security Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 6.1.5 Threat to the Classifier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 6.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 6.2.1 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 6.2.2 Experimental Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 6.2.3 Target Classifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 6.2.4 Model Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 6.2.5 Model Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 6.2.6 Performance Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 6.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 7 Conclusion 153 7.0.1 Limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 7.0.2 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Bibliography 157 Abstract in Korean 195Docto

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

The dynamics of complex systems. Studies and applications in computer science and biology

Our research has focused on the study of complex dynamics and on their use in both information security and bioinformatics. Our first work has been on chaotic discrete dynamical systems, and links have been established between these dynamics on the one hand, and either random or complex behaviors. Applications on information security are on the pseudorandom numbers generation, hash functions, informationhiding, and on security aspects on wireless sensor networks. On the bioinformatics level, we have applied our studies of complex systems to theevolution of genomes and to protein folding