Image

g Steganography
g g p y

By Paul Hammes
 What is Steganography?
z Hiding in plain sight

z C
Comes ffrom greek
k
z ‘steganos’ – covered
z ‘graphie’ – writing

z Hiding a secret message in an ordinary

message.
 Prisoners Problem
z Two inmates wish to communicate to
hatch an escape plan

z The warden can examine all messages

z Passive – only look at message to determine
whether a secret message exists
z Active – will attempt to alter medium even if no
secret message is suspected
Steganography vs Cryptography
z Cryptography
z involves translating message into a cipher or
code.
code
z Third party can not read message but knows
that a secret message is present
 Steganography vs Watermarking
z Watermarking involves including a subtle
but visible message
 Good Medium for Steg
z Something with a lot of redundancy
z Accuracy far greater than required
z Grayscale image has 256 shades of gray
z Trained human eye at most 60 shades

z Good Mediums
z Images
I
z Audio
z Text
 Uses for Steganography
z Information hiding, convey confidential
information where cryptography is not viable
z Third party cannot know that you have confidential
i f
information
ti
z Authenticate Documents
z If embedded data destroyed then medium has been
tampered with
z Protect Intellectual Property
 Aspects of Steg Methods
z Invisibility
z How detectable by observer
z Storage Capacity
z How much data can we hide in the medium
z Robustness against attack
z How secure is it against analysis
z R b t
Robustness against
i t manipulation
i l ti
z Can message be distorded by manipulation
z Resizing,
Resizing cropping
cropping, etc
 What is a computer image?
z Computer image is an array of pixels
z Pixels represent different light intensities
z Are encoded as bit patterns
z Bit
Bit--depth
z 8bit grayscale – 256 levels of gray
z 24bit RGB – 16,777,216 million colors
 Image Compression
z Lossy vs Lossless Compression
z Lossy (JPEG)
z Discards excess image data, removes details that are too
small for human eye to differentiate
z Smaller file size
z Lossless
L l (BMP
(BMP,GIF)
GIF)
z No loss of data, uncompressed image bit
bit--by
by--bit identical
to original
z Larger file size
 Image vs Transform Domain
z Image Domain
z Change bits of image pixels
z Simpler
z Lossless image compression

z Transform Domain
z More Robust
z Lossy and Lossless image compression
 Types of Steg Explored
z LSB Hiding

z Patchwork
P t h k

z Hiding text in Frequency Domain

 LSB Hiding
z Hide most significant bits of message in least
significant bits of image
LSB Hiding Originals
LSB Hiding Encoded
LSB Hiding Reconstructed
 LSB Hiding Pseudo-
Pseudo-code
z Set LSBs to 0 of cover image
g
z Set LSBs of cover image = MSBs of message or to
message bits

z Decode
z Extract
LSB
S from
f steganography image and make
MSB of new image
 LSB Hiding Conclusion
z Visibility of message being hidden depends
on cover image
z Less solid areas are better
z 1bit and 2bit virtually undetectable

z Not Robust against attack or alteration

 LSB Hiding w/ Patchwork
z Split message data into different patches
of cover image
 LSB Hiding w/ Patchwork
Originals

message

Cover image
 LSB Hiding w/ Patchwork
Encoded Image Encoded Data
(2bits per patch)
 LSB Hiding w/ Patchwork
z Reconstructed Message
 Patchwork Conclusion
z Visibility depends on cover image and number
of bits encoded
z Can g get better reconstruction
z More Robust against alteration as data is
redundant
z Can not store as much data
 Hiding in Frequency Domain
z Using FFT to hide message in the
frequency domain of image

z Hide Text String:

z To be,
T b or nott to
t be:
b that
th t is
i the
th question:
ti Whether
Wh th tis
ti nobler
bl iin th
the
mind to suffer. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to
take arms against a sea of troubles
Hiding in Frequency Domain

Original Image Encoded Image

Hiding in Frequency Domain
Original
g Embedded Signal
g
 Hiding in Frequency Domain
z Extracted Message
Frequency Domain Conclusion
z Harder to implement
z More Robust against attack and alteration
z Can be used in lossy compression
z Very Hard to detect as changes in frequency
domain are orders of magnitude smaller than
signal
 Conclusions
z The more data to be hidden to more noise is
introduced into cover image
z If message is an image it will start to become visible
z Transform
T f Domain
D i technique
t h i more robust
b t th
than
image domain techniques but harder to implement
z Patchwork can be used in any scheme to add
redundancy