An efficient 2-step steganography technique is proposed to enhance stego image quality and secret message un-detectability. The first step is a preprocessing algorithm that reduces the size of secret images without losing information. This results in improved stego image quality compared to other existing image steganography methods. The proposed secret image size reduction (SISR) algorithm is an efficient spatial domain technique. The second step is an embedding mechanism that relies on Fibonacci representation of pixel intensities to minimize the effect of embedding on the stego image quality. The improvement is attained by using bit-plane(s) mapping instead of bit-plane(s) replacement for embedding. The proposed embedding mechanism outperforms the binary based LSB randomly embedding in two ways: reduced effect on stego quality and increased robustness against statistical steganalysers. Experimental results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed scheme in terms of: 1) SISR ratio (indirectly results in increased capacity); 2) quality of the stego; and 3) robustness against steganalysers such as RS, and WS. Furthermore, experimental results show that the proposed SISR algorithm can be extended to be applicable on DICOM standard medical images. Future security standardization research is proposed that would focus on evaluating the security, performance, and effectiveness of steganography algorithms.
Performance indicators characterizing modern steganographic techniques include capacity (i.e. the quantity of data that can be hidden in the cover medium), stego quality (i.e. artifacts visibility), security (i.e. undetectability), and strength or robustness (intended as the resistance against active attacks aimed to destroy the secret message). Fibonacci based embedding techniques have been researched and proposed in the literature to achieve efficient steganography in terms of capacity with respect to stego quality. In this paper, we investigated an innovative idea that extends Fibonacci-lik…
This paper focuses on steganography based on pixel intensity value decomposition. A number of existing schemes such as binary, Fibonacci, Prime, Natural, Lucas, and Catalan-Fibonacci (CF) are evaluated in terms of payload capacity and stego quality. A new technique based on a specific representation is used to decompose pixel intensity values into 16 (virtual) bit-planes suitable for embedding purposes. The new decomposition scheme has a desirable property whereby the sum of all bit-planes does not exceed the maximum pixel intensity value, i.e. 255. Experimental results demonstrate that the ne…
It is well known that the designing or improving embedding cost becomes a key issue for current steganographic methods. Unlike existing works, we propose a novel framework to enhance the steganography security via post-processing on the embedding units (i.e., pixel values and DCT coefficients) of stego directly. In this paper, we firstly analyze the characteristics of STCs (Syndrome-Trellis Codes), and then design the rule for post-processing to ensure the correct extraction of hidden message. Since the steganography artifacts are typically reflected on image residuals, we try to reduce the re…
In this paper, we present a new reference dataset simulating digital evidence for image steganography. Steganography detection is a digital image forensic topic that is relatively unknown in practical forensics, although stego app use in the wild is on the rise. This paper introduces the first database consisting of mobile phone photographs and stego images produced from mobile stego apps, including a rich set of side information, offering simulated digital evidence. StegoAppDB, a steganography apps forensics image database, contains over 810,000 innocent and stego images using a minimum of 10…
In this paper, a novel data-driven information hiding scheme called generative steganography by sampling (GSS) is proposed. Unlike in traditional modification-based steganography, in our method the stego image is directly sampled by a powerful generator: no explicit cover is used. Both parties share a secret key used for message embedding and extraction. The Jensen-Shannon divergence is introduced as a new criterion for evaluating the security of generative steganography. Based on these principles, we propose a simple practical generative steganography method that uses semantic image inpaintin…
Steganalysis means analysis of stego images. Like cryptanalysis, steganalysis is used to detect messages often encrypted using secret key from stego images produced by steganography techniques. Recently lots of new and improved steganography techniques are developed and proposed by researchers which require robust steganalysis techniques to detect the stego images having minimum false alarm rate. This paper discusses about the different Steganalysis techniques and help to understand how, where and when this techniques can be used based on different situations.
In this paper, a new framework for construction of Cardan grille for information hiding is proposed. Based on the semantic image inpainting technique, the stego image are driven by secret messages directly. A mask called Digital Cardan Grille (DCG) for determining the hidden location is introduced to hide the message. The message is written to the corrupted region that needs to be filled in the corrupted image in advance. Then the corrupted image with secret message is feeded into a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for semantic completion. The adversarial game not only reconstruct the corr…
Image steganography is the art of hiding secret message in grayscale or color images. Easy detection of secret message for any state-of-art image steganography can break the stego system. To prevent the breakdown of the stego system data is embedded in the selected area of an image which reduces the probability of detection. Most of the existing adaptive image steganography techniques achieve low embedding capacity. In this paper a high capacity Predictive Edge Adaptive image steganography technique is proposed where selective area of cover image is predicted using Modified Median Edge Detecto…
Traditional adaptive steganography is a technique used for covert communication with high security, but it is invalid in the case of stego images are sent to legal receivers over networks which is lossy, such as JPEG compression of channels. To deal with such problem, robust adaptive steganography is proposed to enable the receiver to extract secret messages from the damaged stego images. Previous works utilize reverse engineering and compression-resistant domain constructing to implement robust adaptive steganography. In this paper, we adopt modification with re-compression scheme to improve …
Conventional covert image communication is assumed to transmit the message, in the securest way possible for a given payload, over lossless channels, and the associated steganographic schemes are generally vulnerable to active attacks, e.g., JPEG re-compression, scaling, as seen on social networks. Although considerable progress has been made on robust steganography against JPEG re-compression, there exist few steganographic schemes capable of resisting to scaling attacks due to the tricky inverse interpolations involved in algorithm design. To tackle this issue, a framework for robust image s…
Retention of secrecy is one of the significant features during communication activity. Steganography is one of the popular methods to achieve secret communication between sender and receiver by hiding message in any form of cover media such as an audio, video, text, images etc. Least significant bit encoding is the simplest encoding method used by many steganography programs to hide secret message in 24bit, 8bit colour images and grayscale images. Steganalysis is a method of detecting secret message hidden in a cover media using steganography. RS steganalysis is one of the most reliable stegan…
FGAS: Fixed Decoder Network-Based Audio Steganography with Adversarial Perturbation Generation
School of Communication & Electronic Engineering, East China Normal University（东华大学通信与电子工程学院）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）；School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学学院）；School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学电子信息与电气工程学院）
Historically, steganographic schemes were designed in a way to preserve image statistics or steganalytic features. Since most of the state-of-the-art steganalytic methods employ a machine learning (ML) based classifier, it is reasonable to consider countering steganalysis by trying to fool the ML classifiers. However, simply applying perturbations on stego images as adversarial examples may lead to the failure of data extraction and introduce unexpected artefacts detectable by other classifiers. In this paper, we present a steganographic scheme with a novel operation called adversarial embeddi…
The science of hiding secret information in another message is known as Steganography; hence the presence of secret information is concealed. It is the method of hiding cognitive content in same or another media to avoid recognition by the intruders. This paper introduces new method wherein irreversible steganography is used to hide an image in the same medium so that the secret data is masked. The secret image is known as payload and the carrier is known as cover image. X-OR operation is used amongst mid level bit planes of carrier image and high level bit planes of data image to generate new…
Steganography is the science of unnoticeably concealing a secret message within a certain image, called a cover image. The cover image with the secret message is called a stego image. Steganography is commonly used for illegal purposes such as terrorist activities and pornography. To thwart covert communications and transactions, attacking algorithms against steganography, called steganalysis, exist. Currently, there are many studies implementing deep learning to the steganography algorithm. However, conventional steganalysis is no longer effective for deep learning based steganography algorit…
In the era of Information Technology, cyber-crime has always been a worrying issue for online users. Phishing, social engineering, and third party attacks have made people reluctant to share their personal information, even with trusted entities. Messages that are sent via Short Message Service (SMS) are easily copied and hacked by using special software. To enforce the security of sending messages through mobile phones, one solution is SMS steganography. SMS Steganography is a technique that hides a secret message in the SMS. We propose a new approach for SMS steganography that uses a mathema…
In this paper, the authors propose a new algorithm to hide data inside image using steganography technique. The proposed algorithm uses binary codes and pixels inside an image. The zipped file is used before it is converted to binary codes to maximize the storage of data inside the image. By applying the proposed algorithm, a system called Steganography Imaging System (SIS) is developed. The system is then tested to see the viability of the proposed algorithm. Various sizes of data are stored inside the images and the PSNR (Peak signal-to-noise ratio) is also captured for each of the images te…
Image steganography is the art of hiding information into a cover image. This paper presents a novel technique for Image steganography based on Block-DCT, where DCT is used to transform original image (cover image) blocks from spatial domain to frequency domain. Firstly a gray level image of size M x N is divided into no joint 8 x 8 blocks and a two dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (2-d DCT) is performed on each of the P = MN / 64 blocks. Then Huffman encoding is also performed on the secret messages/images before embedding and each bit of Huffman code of secret message/image is embedded …
As the multimedia and internet technologies are growing fast, the transmission of digital media plays an important role in communication. The various digital media like audio, video and images are being transferred through internet. There are a lot of threats for the digital data that are transferred through internet. Also, a number of security techniques have been employed to protect the data that is transferred through internet. This paper proposes a new technique for sending secret messages securely, using steganographic technique. Since the proposed system uses multiple level of security f…
Image steganalysis is a special binary classification problem that aims to classify natural cover images and suspected stego images which are the results of embedding very weak secret message signals into covers. How to effectively suppress cover image content and thus make the classification of cover images and stego images easier is the key of this task. Recent researches show that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are very effective to detect steganography by learning discriminative features between cover images and their stegos. Several deep CNN models have been proposed via incorporatin…
Whereas cryptography easily arouses attacks by means of encrypting a secret message into a suspicious form, steganography is advantageous for its resilience to attacks by concealing the message in an innocent-looking cover signal. Minimal distortion steganography, one of the mainstream steganography frameworks, embeds messages while minimizing the distortion caused by the modification on the cover elements. Due to the unavailability of the original cover signal for the receiver, message embedding is realized by finding the coset leader of the syndrome function of steganographic codes migrated …
In order to improve the data hiding in all types of multimedia data formats such as image and audio and to make hidden message imperceptible, a novel method for steganography is introduced in this paper. It is based on Least Significant Bit (LSB) manipulation and inclusion of redundant noise as secret key in the message. This method is applied to data hiding in images. For data hiding in audio, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) both are used. All the results displayed prove to be time-efficient and effective. Also the algorithm is tested for various numbers o…
Steganography Beyond Space-Time with Chain of Multimodal AI
Information and Society Research Division, National Institute of Informatics（信息与社会研究部，日本信息机构）；Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo（东京大学信息科学与技术研究生院）；School of Multidisciplinary Sciences, Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI)（多学科科学学院，研究生高级研究大学（SOKENDAI））
The needs for steganographic techniques for hiding secret message inside images have been arise. This paper is to create a practical steganographic implementation to hide text inside grey scale images. The secret message is hidden inside the cover image using Five Modulus Method. The novel algorithm is called (ST-FMM. FMM which consists of transforming all the pixels within the 5X5 window size into its corresponding multiples of 5. After that, the secret message is hidden inside the 5X5 window as a non-multiples of 5. Since the modulus of non-multiples of 5 are 1,2,3 and 4, therefore; if the r…
In this contribution we propose a novel steganographic method based on several orthogonal polynomials and their combinations. The steganographic algorithm embeds a secrete message at the first eight coefficients of high frequency image. Moreover, this embedding method uses the Beta chaotic map to determine the order of the blocks where the secret bits will be inserted. In addition, from a 128-bit private key and the steps of a cryptography algorithm according to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to generate the key expansion, the proposed method generates a key expansion of 2560 bits, wit…
Style as Cover: Deep Image Steganography via Stylized Transmission
Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences)（齐鲁工业大学（山东省科学院））；Shandong Computer Science Center（山东省计算中心）；Shandong Fundamental Research Center for Computer Science（山东省计算机科学基础研究中心）
Image steganography is art of hiding information onto the cover image. In this proposal a transformed domain based gray scale image authentication/data hiding technique using Z transform (ZT) termed as FDSZT, has been proposed. ZTransform is applied on 2x2 masks of the source image in row major order to transform original sub image (cover image) block to its corresponding frequency domain. One bit of the hidden image is embedded in each mask of the source image onto the fourth LSB of transformed coefficient based on median value of the mask. A delicate handle has also been performed as post em…
Addressing the security concerns in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a challenging task, which has attracted the attention of many researchers from the last few decades. Researchers have presented various schemes in WSN, addressing the problems of processing, bandwidth, load balancing, and efficient routing. However, little work has been done on security aspects of WSN. In a typical WSN network, the tiny nodes installed on different locations sense the surrounding environment, send the collected data to their neighbors, which in turn is forwarded to a sink node. The sink node aggregate the da…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
Data hiding with deep neural networks (DNNs) has experienced impressive successes in recent years. A prevailing scheme is to train an autoencoder, consisting of an encoding network to embed (or transform) secret messages in (or into) a carrier, and a decoding network to extract the hidden messages. This scheme may suffer from several limitations regarding practicability, security, and embedding capacity. In this work, we describe a different computational framework to hide images in deep probabilistic models. Specifically, we use a DNN to model the probability density of cover images, and hide…
Image Steganography is a thriving research area of information security where secret data is embedded in images to hide its existence while getting the minimum possible statistical detectability. This paper proposes a novel magic least significant bit substitution method (M-LSB-SM) for RGB images. The proposed method is based on the achromatic component (I-plane) of the hue-saturation-intensity (HSI) color model and multi-level encryption (MLE) in the spatial domain. The input image is transposed and converted into an HSI color space. The I-plane is divided into four sub-images of equal size, …
Steganalysis as a method to detect whether image contains se-cret message, is a crucial study avoiding the imperils from abus-ing steganography. The point of steganalysis is to detect the weak embedding signals which is hardly learned by convolution-al layer and easily suppressed. In this paper, to enhance embed-ding signals, we study the insufficiencies of activation function, filters and loss function from the aspects of reduce embedding signal loss and enhance embedding signal capture ability. Adap-tive Parametric Activation Module is designed to reserve nega-tive embedding signal. For embe…
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学）
Steganography algorithms facilitate communication between a source and a destination in a secret manner. This is done by embedding messages/text/data into images without impacting the appearance of the resultant images/videos. Steganalysis is the science of determining if an image has secret messages embedded/hidden in it. Because there are numerous steganography algorithms, and since each one of them requires a different type of steganalysis, the steganalysis process is extremely challenging. Thus, researchers aim to develop one universal steganalysis to detect all known and unknown steganogr…
