PROJECT PRE-DATA SEMINAR

ON

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY

BY

PETERS SAMSON OWOLABI

S215202014

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

COLLEGE OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

SUPERVISED BY

ADELANI S.A

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 SECTION ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

Due to advances in information and communication technology (ICT), most of information is

electronically stored and transmitted. Consequently, the security of information has become an

underlying concern as well as a threat to all and sundry. The rate of migration to this platform is

at constant increase. The growing possibilities of modern communications need the special

means of security especially on computer network. The network security is becoming more

important as the number of data being exchanged on the internet increases. Therefore, the

confidentiality and data integrity are required to protect against unauthorized access and use

(Artz, 2001). This has resulted in an explosive growth of the field of information security. The

use of image to hide information is one of such security techniques which is known as image

steganography. This work looks at how information within institutions can be secured as they

seek to go electronic in administration. The steganography technique apart from hiding an

information from a user, it disguises the information as an image thus distracting the intruder

from his/her original intention.

Steganography is the art of hiding the fact that communication is taking place, by hiding

information in other information. Steganography is the practice of hiding private or sensitive

information within something that appears to be nothing out to the usual. (Silman, 2001)

Steganography is often confused with cryptology because the two are similar in the way that they

both are used to protect important information. The difference between two is that steganography

involves hiding information so it appears that no information is hidden at all. If a person or

persons views the object that the information is hidden inside of he or she will have no idea that
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there is any hidden information, therefore the person will not attempt to decrypt the information.

(Chandramouli, Kharrazi & Memon, 2003).

Information hiding is an emerging research area, which encompasses applications such as

watermarking, fingerprinting, copyright protection for digital media, and steganography. In

watermarking applications for instance, the message contains information such as owner

identification and a digital time stamp, which usually applied for copyright protection.

"Regarding fingerprint, the owner of the data set embeds a serial number that uniquely identifies

the user of the data set. This adds to copyright information to make it possible to trace any

unauthorized use of the data set back to the user." (Dunbar, 2002).

Besides cryptography, steganography can be employed to secure information. In steganography,

Moerland (2001) has it that, the message or encrypted message is embedded in a digital host

before passing it through the network, thus the existence of the message is unknown. Besides

hiding data for confidentiality, this approach of information hiding can be extended to copyright

protection for digital media: audio, video and images.

Steganography becomes more important as more people join the cyberspace revolution. Silman

(2001) states that, "steganography is the art of concealing information in ways that prevents the

detection of hidden messages. Steganography includes an array of secret communication

methods that hide the message from being seen or discovered." Steganography secreted the

confidential message within the host data set and presence subtle and is to be reliably

communicated to a receiver. The host data set is purposely corrupted, but in a covert way,

designed to be invisible to an information analysis.

What steganography essentially does is exploit human perception, human senses are not trained

to look for files that have information inside of them, although this software is available that can
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do what is called Steganography. The most common use of steganography is to hide a file inside

another file. The word steganography comes from the Greek Seganos, which mean covered or

secret and graphy mean writing or drawing. Therefore, steganography mean, literally,

covered writing. It is the art and science of hiding information such its presence cannot be

detected and a communication is happening. A secret information is encoded in a manner such

that the very existence of the information is concealed. Paired with existing communication

methods, steganography can be used to carry out hidden exchanges. The basic model of

steganography consists of Carrier, Message and password. Carrier is also known as cover-object,

which the message is embedded and serves to hide the presence of the message.

1.2 Motivation

The goal of steganography is covert communication. So, a fundamental requirement of this

steganography system is that the hider message carried by stego-media should not be sensible to

human beings. To avoid drawing suspicion to the existence of a hidden message. This approach

of information hiding technique has recently became important in a number of application area.

Steganography sometimes is used when encryption is not permitted. Or, more commonly,

steganography is used to supplement encryption. An encrypted file may still hide information

using steganography, so even if the encrypted file is deciphered, the hidden message is not seen

1.3 Statement of Problem

The former consists of linguistic or language forms of hidden writing. The later, such as invisible

ink, try of hide messages physically. One disadvantage of linguistic steganography is that users

must equip themselves to have a good knowledge of linguistry. In recent years, everything is

trending toward digitization. And with the development of the internet technology, digital media

can be transmitted conveniently over the network. Therefore, messages can be secretly carried by

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digital media by using the steganography techniques, and then be transmitted through the internet

rapidly. Steganography 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 steganography techniques some are more

complex than others and all of them have respective strong and weak points. This project would

therefore develop and implement an application to make the information hiding more simple and

user friendly.

1.4 Aims and Objectives

This project has following objectives:

To produce a security tool based on steganography techniques.

To explore techniques of hiding data using encryption module of this project

To extract techniques of getting secret data using decryption module.

To create program this can be used to conceal vital business information at a low cost.

To design a user friendly and distinct security system that enhances information security.

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 SECTION TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Historical Overview of Steganography

One of the latest techniques that have been used in this area by researchers at the Mount Sinai

School in New York in 1999, as they managed to hide the secret texts in Chromosome Strand

human DNA by using a technique called genetic system coverage (Genomic Steganography),

and by placing signs resolution to be agreed upon in the nuclei chromosomes and then integrate

these with millions sentences and sent to the other end. To extract the secret message is soaking

get special distinction sentences used on the other and then placed under the microscope to

extract the required text (Ahiawe, 2014). The oldest Authentications on Steganography taken

from the legendary stories Greeks Herodotus and then back to the fifth century BC, these sources

indicate that they felt they fly head of the Messenger and then write the secret letter in the head,

leaving hair to grow then be sent to the required which is a re-extraction letter. (Ahaiwe, 2014).

Authentications and other writing secret messages on the wood panels and then covered wax and

will be hid those writing panels appear free of anything. And they were killing their animals as

rabbit example corner confidential letter inside it. Other means that the common use since the

first century AD, invisible inks Invisible Inks, which was able to write a confidential letter with

any other nonvalue-confidential and usually write between lines, for example those rabbis some

fruit juices Fruit Juices, milk, urine, vinegar, and all these species become dark and visible when

exposed to heat the written document.

Then these kinds of inks evolved with the evolution of science chemical was used vehicles

carrying chemical characteristics of the same old species with a more accurate and efficient have

been used during the First and Second World Wars in the military secrecy of correspondence.
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Other technical been used during World War II is sending a message hidden within another

message is not relevant, and based on the idea of a nomination letters every word of the letter

counterfeit representation of characters from the characters letter requested confidentiality.

(Ahiawe, 2014)

2.2 Review of Related Work

Modern steganographic techniques have far more powerful tools that attract many giants

commercial companies whose wish are to safeguard their information from piracy and imitation.

As a result, most efficient steganographic techniques will provide proficient means of

information protection. There are many on-going researches aimed at unveiling the most efficient

steganographic techniques, among which are, the work of

Por (2008), which presents an overview of text steganography by Hiding information in

manipulation of whitespaces between words and paragraph which offers dynamic generated

stego-text and generate a cover-text dynamically by offering six options for user according to

their length of the secret message

Yun and Clark (2010), Present a method for checking the acceptability of paraphrases in context

by using the Google n-gram data and a CCG parser to certify the paraphrasing grammaticality

and fluency, which automatically generated paraphrases as a new and useful source of

transformations for Linguistic Steganography which is in a specific dedicate language and

domain independent, requiring only a paraphrase dictionary and a Google n-gram corpus.

Por and Delina (2008) also presents an overview of steganography on GIF image format in order

to explore the potential of GIF in information hiding research. He explored the enhancement of

the Least Significant Bits (LSB) insertion techniques from the most basic and conventional 1 bit

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to the LSB colour cycle method and integrate three algorithms in one steganography system it

also focused in assimilation of diversified methods into a whole gamut of steganography

systems.

Nasir, Kumar, Sur and Nandi (2011) present a steganographic technique that sends secret data in

the length of the network packets the length of UDP datagram is modified to embed the secret

data on a UDP based chat application and obtained the length pattern, which follows the normal

network flow even after embedding the secret data

Cui-ling; Yi-lin; YuZhu (2011) present a steganographic technique based on JPEG digital images,

in their approach, instead of dividing cover-image into 88 blocks, non-overlapping blocks of

1616 pixels is used and a quantization table is constructed, the DCT coefficients are quantized

and embedded the secret messages

Banoci, Bugar and Levicky (2011) also present a steganographic technique using transform

domain of Discrete Wavelet transform (DWT) by modifying of transform coefficients in an

appropriate manner which do not require original image for successful extraction of the secret

information.

All the related work on the steganographic techniques reviewed in this research was seen to be

experimentally tested and the proofs of the performances were at the testing level. What I did

compare to the above related works is testing some techniques at the implementation level in

order to proof the performances.

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 SECTION THREE

3.1 Design of Proposed Study

Basically, the model for steganography is shown on following figure:

Cover-object, C

F(X,M,K)

Message, M Stego Object, Z

Stego-key, K

Message is the data that the sender wishes to remain it confidential. It can
be plain text, ciphertext, other image, or anything that can be embedded in
a bit stream such as a copyright mark, a covert communication, or a serial
number. Password is known as stego-key, which ensures that only recipient
who know the corresponding decoding key will be able to extract the
message from a cover-object. The cover-object with the secretly embedded
message is then called the Stego-object.

Recovering message from a stego-object requires the cover-object itselt and

a corresponding decoding key if a stego-key was used during the encoding
process. The original image may or may not be required in most applications
to extract the message.

There are several suitable carriers below to be the cover-object:

Network protocols such as TCP, IP and UDP

Audio that using digital audio formats

File and Disk that can hides and append files by using the slack
space

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 Text such as null characters, just alike morse code including html
and java

Images file such as bmp, gif and jpg, where they can be both
color and gray-scale.

In general, the information hiding process extracts redundant bits from

cover-object. The process consists of two steps:

Identification of redundant bits in a cover-object. Redundant bits

are those bits that can be modified without corrupting the quality
or destroying the integrity of the cover-object.

Embedding process then selects the subset of the redundant bits

to be replaced with data from a secret message. The stego-
object is created by replacing the selected redundant bits with
message bits

3.2 Design Algorithm

The algorithm used for Encryption and Decryption in this application provides using several

layers lieu of using only LSB layer of image. Writing data starts from last layer (8st or LSB

layer); because significant of this layer is least and every upper layer has doubled significant

from its down layer. So every step we go to upper layer image quality decreases and image

retouching transpires.

A. Proposed encryption technique.

Inputs: - Text file, cover image 1, cover image 2 and secret key.

Output: - Stego image.

Begin

1. Select a text file, convert it into binary form and calculate the number of bits in it.

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 2. Select a carrier image (cover image 1) for hiding purpose, find the number of pixels,

convert it into RGB image and calls the compression function.

3. If bits calculated are compatible with the image resolution, then

Start sub iteration 1

Replace red component of the first pixel with first character.

Replace green component of the second pixel with second character.

Replace blue component of the third pixel with third character.

And repeat iterations until pixels get exhaust.

Stop sub iteration 1

Else

Repeat sub iteration 1

Finds necessary compression ratio and perform sub iteration 2.

Sub iteration 2

Replace necessary bits as defined by the compression ratio in immediate component of each

pixel. Store the information about bits embedded in a binary address file.

Stop sub iteration2

4. Provide a security key as encryption completes.

5. Select 2nd cover image to hide the distorted stego image.

End

B. Proposed decryption technique.

Input: - Stego image and secret key.

Output: - Secret text file.

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Begin

1. Browse the stego image.

2. Choose the folder in which you want to extract the hidden file.

3. Provide necessary security key.

4. Convert the binary file into human readable form.

End

3.3 Design Details

The graphical representation of Steganography system is as follows:

Based on the proposed algorithm, I will develop a system in C# that implements the algorithm.

Reasons for choosing C# as a programming language are as: -

1. Simple to use.
2. Trustworthy in nature.
3. Purely object oriented.
4. Lots of information available online.
System we have developed basically comprises of two main interfaces, one for embedding

purpose and other for the extraction process.

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 SECTION FOUR

4.0 Proposed Implementation

This section describes how the implementation and evaluation of the proposed steganography

system will be executed.

4.1 Dataset/ Sample

i. survey will be involve on the test of the image before and after hidden

data

4.2 Implementation Requirement

In order to realize this project, the following software and hardware components will be used

A. Hardware Requirement

In the cost of the design, the software developed needed the following hardware for an effective

and efficient operation of the new system.

a) Intel Computer System.

b) At least 1GB RAM.
c) Enhanced keyboard.
d) At least 12OGB hard disk.
e) V.G.A, a coloured monitor.
f) An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units
g) LaserJet or DeskJet printer.
B. Software Requirement

The software requirements include: -

i. Windows XP operating system or higher version for faster processing

ii. Microsoft C# Programming Language,

iii. Visual Studio development environment

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iv. Dot Net Framework 3.5

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 SECTION FIVE

5.1 Expected Contribution to Knowledge

The significance of steganography techniques comes from the fact the there is no reliability over
the medium through which the information is send, in other words the medium is not secured.
So, some methods are needed so that it becomes difficult for unintended user to extract the
information from the message.

The new system is designed to solve problems affecting the reliability and security. It is design
for analyzing, encryption and decryption of information within images. The new stego image can
then be used by the user to send it via internet or email to other parties without revealing the
secret data inside the image.

5.2 Progress Report

I have been able to identify the common methods that are applied in computer by using
Multimedia files like text, images and sound. Then the limitations and disadvantages of these
methods, strength and weakness factors of Steganography, and attacking techniques on hidden
information, also countermeasures against attacks in order to increase the systems efficiency.
Also, I have proposed an algorithm to hide information and increase the efficiency of hiding in
the image files by making use of Human Visible System (HVS) characteristics.

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 REFERENCES

Ahaiwe J. (2014). Document Security within Institutions Using Image Steganography Technique.
International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Volume 3 Issue 4, April 2014
Artz, D. (2001). Digital Steganography: Hiding Data within Data. IEEE Internet Computing
Journal, (June).
Banoci, V.; Bugar, G.; Levicky, D. (2011). A novel method of image steganography in DWT
domain;21st International Conference on Radioelektronika (RADIOELEKTRONIKA),
2011 10.1109/RADIOELEK.2011.5936455 2011 , Page(s): 1 4
Chandramouli, R., Kharrazi, M. & Memon, N.(2003). Image steganography and steganalysis:
Concepts and Practice. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Digital
Watermarking, October.
Ching-Yun C. and Clark S. (2010). Linguistic Steganography Using Automatically Generated
Paraphrases Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the North American Association for
Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT-10), pp. 591-599, Los Angeles, 2010
Cui-ling J; Yi-lin P; YuZhu, Y. (2011); A steganographic method based on the JPEG digital
images 3rd International Conference on Computer Research and Development
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Dunbar, B. (2002). Steganographic techniques and their use in an Open-Systems environment.
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Lee, Y.K. & Chen, L.H. (2000). High capacity image steganographic model. Visual Image
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using UDP protocol. 3rd International Conference on Communication Software and Networks.
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