An Overview of Steganography for the Computer Forensics Examiner (Updated Version, February 2015)

Steganography is the art of covered or hidden writing. The purpose of steganography is covert communication-to hide the existence of a message from a third party. This paper is intended as a high-level technical introduction to steganography for those unfamiliar with the field. It is directed at forensic computer examiners who need a practical understanding of steganography without delving into the mathematics, although references are provided to some of the ongoing research for the person who needs or wants additional detail. Although this paper provides a historical context for steganography, the emphasis is on digital applications, focusing on hiding information in online image or audio files. Examples of software tools that employ steganography to hide data inside of other files as well as software to detect such hidden files will also be presented. An edited version originally published in the July 2004 issues of Forensic Science Communications

Transaction Document Security Protection in the Form of Image File, Jpg or Tif Interbank Transfer Using Steganography and Cryptography

 Information security process can be done by hiding the information on other media or by certain methods, so that other people do not realize there is some information in the media. Technique known as Steganography and Cryptography. Steganography is a technique to hide or disguise the existence of secret messages in the media reservoirs. While Cryptography disguise the meaning of a message, but do not hide that there is a message. In a bank cannot be separated in the presence of inter-bank transactions which transfer if the transfer interbank transactions done in branch offices and nominal transaction exceeds the transaction limit branch offices will require official approval in the upper branch. How do I prove the authenticity of the document transfer transaction? Therefore, a company in the banking sector needs to be a medium to prove the validity of the document sent by the branch transaction. In this case the author has designed an application with a blend of steganography and cryptography techniques that can be used in testing the validity of the transaction document. By using steganographic techniques undercover in a media that has brought and cryptographic key assignment as random, then the document that is sent in the branch office can be proved

Security during Transmission of Data Using Web Steganography

The project entitled Steganography is to give security to a content record. Since the security of the data over the internet has raised a concern to the people. There are many methods to protect the data from going into the access of unauthorized people. Steganography can be used along with the encryption technique to secure the data. Steganography is used to hide the data or a secret message whereas cryptography is used to encrypt the message and make it difficult the people to read. So, the proposed system is to combine both steganography and cryptography for the secret data transmission. The transmission can be done by using an image as a carrier of data. This paper uses high-performance BMP steganography along with a substitution encryption methodology. The approach that is used here is IDEA (International Data Encryption Algorithm) algorithm which is used for encryption. The IDEA algorithm works as follows, it will take the TEXT document and mystery key as the input and gives the encrypted and BMP picture as the output for the sender side. There can additionally be “Voice Recognition System” framework so that it can use voice to decrypt the message. This is the future expansion or scope of this paper

Steganographically Encoded Data

Steganography is the art of hiding information in ways that prevent its detection. Though steganography is an ancient craft, the onset of computer technology has given it new life. Computer-based steganographic techniques introduce changes to digital covers to embed information foreign to the native covers. Such information may be communicated in the form of text, binary files, or provide additional information about the cover and its owner such as digital watermarks or fingerprints. This paper explains steganography, provides a brief history and describes how steganography is applied in hiding information in images.Steganography, information hiding, digital image, digital watermarking

Comparative Analysis of Hybrid Algorithms in Information Hiding

In this present work, propose comparative algorithms to conceal information into the image using steganography method. The proposedalgorithms use binary codes and pixels inside an image. The zipped file is used before it is transformed to binary codes to make the most of the storage of data inside the image. By applying the algorithms, a system called Steganography Imaging Information System (SIIS) is developed. The system is then tested to see the viability of the proposed algorithm. Different sizes of data are stored inside the images and the PSNR (Peak signal-to-noise ratio) is also captured for each of the images tested. According to the PSNR value of each image, the concealed image has a higher PSNR value. Therefore, this new steganography algorithm efficiently hides the data in the image

Digital Image Steganography

Steganography is defined as the science of hiding or embedding data in a transmission medium. Its ultimate objectives, which are undetectability, robustness (i.e., against image processing and other attacks) and capacity of the hidden data (i.e., how much data we can hide in the carrier file), are the main factors that distinguish it from other sisters-in science. techniques, namely watermarking and Cryptography. This paper provides an overview of well known Steganography methods. It identifies current research problems in this area and discusses how our current research approach could solve some of these problems. We propose using human skin tone detection in colour images to form an adaptive context for an edge operator which will provide an excellent secure location for data hiding

Steganography

Multi Layer Security (MLS) is the art of hiding the fact that communication is taking place, by hiding information in other information. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency on the internet. For hiding secret information in images, there exists a large variety of techniques some are more complex than others and all of them have respective strong and weak points. Different applications may require absolute invisibility of the secret information, while others require a large secret message to be hidden. This project report intends to give an overview of image encryption, its uses and techniques. It also attempts to identify the requirements of a good algorithm and briefly reflects on which techniques are more suitable for applications

Information Analysis for Steganography and Steganalysis in 3D Polygonal Meshes

Information hiding, which embeds a watermark/message over a cover signal, has recently found extensive applications in, for example, copyright protection, content authentication and covert communication. It has been widely considered as an appealing technology to complement conventional cryptographic processes in the field of multimedia security by embedding information into the signal being protected. Generally, information hiding can be classified into two categories: steganography and watermarking. While steganography attempts to embed as much information as possible into a cover signal, watermarking tries to emphasize the robustness of the embedded information at the expense of embedding capacity. In contrast to information hiding, steganalysis aims at detecting whether a given medium has hidden message in it, and, if possible, recover that hidden message. It can be used to measure the security performance of information hiding techniques, meaning a steganalysis resistant steganographic/watermarking method should be imperceptible not only to Human Vision Systems (HVS), but also to intelligent analysis. As yet, 3D information hiding and steganalysis has received relatively less attention compared to image information hiding, despite the proliferation of 3D computer graphics models which are fairly promising information carriers. This thesis focuses on this relatively neglected research area and has the following primary objectives: 1) to investigate the trade-off between embedding capacity and distortion by considering the correlation between spatial and normal/curvature noise in triangle meshes; 2) to design satisfactory 3D steganographic algorithms, taking into account this trade-off; 3) to design robust 3D watermarking algorithms; 4) to propose a steganalysis framework for detecting the existence of the hidden information in 3D models and introduce a universal 3D steganalytic method under this framework. %and demonstrate the performance of the proposed steganalysis by testing it against six well-known 3D steganographic/watermarking methods. The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 1 describes in detail the background relating to information hiding and steganalysis, as well as the research problems this thesis will be studying. Chapter 2 conducts a survey on the previous information hiding techniques for digital images, 3D models and other medium and also on image steganalysis algorithms. Motivated by the observation that the knowledge of the spatial accuracy of the mesh vertices does not easily translate into information related to the accuracy of other visually important mesh attributes such as normals, Chapters 3 and 4 investigate the impact of modifying vertex coordinates of 3D triangle models on the mesh normals. Chapter 3 presents the results of an empirical investigation, whereas Chapter 4 presents the results of a theoretical study. Based on these results, a high-capacity 3D steganographic algorithm capable of controlling embedding distortion is also presented in Chapter 4. In addition to normal information, several mesh interrogation, processing and rendering algorithms make direct or indirect use of curvature information. Motivated by this, Chapter 5 studies the relation between Discrete Gaussian Curvature (DGC) degradation and vertex coordinate modifications. Chapter 6 proposes a robust watermarking algorithm for 3D polygonal models, based on modifying the histogram of the distances from the model vertices to a point in 3D space. That point is determined by applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to the cover model. The use of PCA makes the watermarking method robust against common 3D operations, such as rotation, translation and vertex reordering. In addition, Chapter 6 develops a 3D specific steganalytic algorithm to detect the existence of the hidden messages embedded by one well-known watermarking method. By contrast, the focus of Chapter 7 will be on developing a 3D watermarking algorithm that is resistant to mesh editing or deformation attacks that change the global shape of the mesh. By adopting a framework which has been successfully developed for image steganalysis, Chapter 8 designs a 3D steganalysis method to detect the existence of messages hidden in 3D models with existing steganographic and watermarking algorithms. The efficiency of this steganalytic algorithm has been evaluated on five state-of-the-art 3D watermarking/steganographic methods. Moreover, being a universal steganalytic algorithm can be used as a benchmark for measuring the anti-steganalysis performance of other existing and most importantly future watermarking/steganographic algorithms. Chapter 9 concludes this thesis and also suggests some potential directions for future work

Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications

Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring low-volume unobservable communication.Comment: 13 Page