Steganography

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 What is it?
 The art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way
that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient,
suspects the existence of the message.

"Boss said that we should blow up the bridge at midnight.”

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 Cover Image and Stego-Image

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 Some Terms….
• Cryptography:
- cryptography - concealing the content of messages
- steganography - concealing their existence

• Digital watermarking:
- Information is embedded into digital multimedia content
such that the watermark (information) can later be extracted
and detected for purposes such as copy prevention and
control.

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 Prisoners Problem
Wendy

Is it stego??

Suppress Message

Bob
Alice

Extracting
Embedding
algorithm
algorithm

Secret key Cover Message

Secret Message Hidden Message Secret key

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 LSB METHOD

6 CS691 Summer 2009

 Least Significant Bit Substitution
(SPATIAL DOMAIN)
 Embedding process:
- Choose a subset of cover elements
- Exchange LSB of each element by 0 or 1
- Another approach is to use a 2-bit LSB

 Extraction process:
- Extract LSB of each cover element (either 1 or 2-bit)
- Line them up to reconstruct secret message

 Receiver must know the sequence of element indices used in the

embedding process.

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 Problems with LSB substitution
 A strong assumption of a passive attacker that the small
changes in the carrier are not noticed.

 The main problem with this is the part of the image in which
the information is embedded has different statistical
properties than the rest of the image.

 Most image hiding techniques use uncompressed (BMP) or

lossless (GIF) cover images but take a lot of transmission
bandwidth and storage space.

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 TRANSFORM DOMAIN
(Embedding Part)

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 TRANSFORM DOMAIN
(Extracting Part)

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 Applications..
 Confidential communication and secret data storing
 Protection of data alteration
 Access control system for digital content distribution
 Media Database systems

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