Code wars: steganography, signals intelligence, and terrorism

This paper describes and discusses the process of secret communication known as steganography. The argument advanced here is that terrorists are unlikely to be employing digital steganography to facilitate secret intra-group communication as has been claimed. This is because terrorist use of digital steganography is both technically and operationally implausible. The position adopted in this paper is that terrorists are likely to employ low-tech steganography such as semagrams and null ciphers instead

Stealthy Plaintext

Correspondence through email has become a very significant way of communication at workplaces. Information of most kinds such as text, video and audio can be shared through email, the most common being text. With confidential data being easily sharable through this method most companies monitor the emails, thus invading the privacy of employees. To avoid secret information from being disclosed it can be encrypted. Encryption hides the data effectively but this makes the data look important and hence prone to attacks to decrypt the information. It also makes it obvious that there is secret information being transferred. The most effective way would be to make the information seem harmless by concealing the information in the email but not encrypting it. We would like the information to pass through the analyzer without being detected. This project aims to achieve this by “encrypting” plain text by replacing suspicious keywords with non-suspicious English words, trying to keep the grammatical syntax of the sentences intact

An Adaptive FLV Steganography Approach Using Simulated Annealing

Steganography is not only the art of hiding secret messages in cover media but also a process of communication and secure data transfer. Secret messages can be sent over the Internet with security by using several steganography techniques, but all of them present challenges in steganalysis. This study proposes a new secure technique called flash video (FLV) file steganography that keeps the frame video quality and is difficult to detect. The technique can hide any type of secret message inside a given FLV file. The secret message is divided into packets of the same length, reordered packet, and encrypted bytes before being hidden at the end of a selected video tag. A simulated annealing (SA) approach to select tags for steganography is presented to reduce or avoid the challenge of steganalysis. The proposed method uses SA as supporting framework to deal with the FLV file as a host for different types of secret messages. The system determines the minimum path within the host FLV file by using SA and hides the message bits inside each pixel in the minimum computed path. Analysis of the host FLV file cannot be performed without proper knowledge on the transformation process. Thus, the existence of the secret message is difficult to detect by steganalysis. Knowledge is represented by the key of finding the minimum path in the host FLV file, key of secret message length, key of additional bytes, key of message packets reordering and key of message extension. Experimental results show that the proposed technique satisfies the main requirements of steganography with regard to visual appearance, capacity, undetectability, and robustness against extraction

Securing Text File on Audio Files using Least Significant Bit (LSB) and Blowfish

Along with the development of technology, communication can be done in various ways, one of which is digital messages. But often the messages sent do not reach their destination and are obtained by irresponsible parties. This happens because of the lack of security in the file. For this reason, security is needed so that messages cannot be stolen or seen by other parties. There are various ways to secure messages, including Steganography and Cryptography techniques. This study uses a combination of the Least Significant Bit method and the Blowfish algorithm to secure secret messages in audio files. This research will measure encryption and decryption time, analysis of message file size changes after encryption and decryption, and PSNR value of audio files. The result of encryption using blowfish is a change in the size of the message file caused by the size of the message file is less than the block cipher size, so additional bytes are given so that the message size matches the block cipher size. The speed of the encryption and decryption process using the blowfish algorithm results in an average time for encryption of 547.98ms while the average time for decryption is 538.19ms. The longest time for the encryption process is 557.30ms and the fastest is 534.50ms, while the longest time for the decryption process is 548.74ms and the fastest is 531.46ms. Hiding messages in audio files using LSB produces PSNR values above 30dB

Files cryptography based on one-time pad algorithm

The Vernam-cipher is known as a one-time pad of algorithm that is an unbreakable algorithm because it uses a typically random key equal to the length of data to be coded, and a component of the text is encrypted with an element of the encryption key. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to overcome the obstacles that hinder the use of the Vernam algorithm. First, the Vernam and advance encryption standard AES algorithms are used to encrypt the data as well as to hide the encryption key; Second, a password is placed on the file because of the use of the AES algorithm; thus, the protection record becomes very high. The Huffman algorithm is then used for data compression to reduce the size of the output file. A set of files are encrypted and decrypted using our methodology. The experiments demonstrate the flexibility of our method, and it’s successful without losing any information