IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY

A PROJECT REPORT Submitted to Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology ,Burla in partial fulfillment for the award of the degree of

BACHELOR OF TECHNOLOGY
IN

COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING By

AJIT KUMAR SATAPATHY

Regd No.-0801111094

Under guidance of Prof. Rakesh Mohanty

Degree of Computer Science and Engineering VEER SURENDRA SAI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY : BURLA, ODISHA,INDIA
NOV 2011

VEER SURENDRA SAI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY : BURLA

BONAFIDE CERTIFICATE

Certified that this project report

IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY who carried out the

is the bonafide work of AJIT KUMAR SATAPATHY project work under my supervision.

SIGNATURE Prof.M.R.Kabat HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT

SIGNATURE Prof .R.K.Mohanty SUPERVISOR

COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGG. VSSUT ,BURLA ODISHA

COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGG. VSSUT ,BURLA ODISHA

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER NO. ABSTRACT

TITLE

PAGE NO. 6 7

LIST OF FIGURES

1.

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Steganography vs cryptography 1.2 Types of Steganography 1.2.1 Text stganography 1.2.1.1 Line shift coding 1.2.1.2 Word shift coding 1.2.1.3 Feature coding 1.2.1.4 Implementation 1.2.2 Image steganography 1.2.2.1 Least significant bits 1.2.2.2 Hiding the data 1.2.2.3 Recovery the data 1.2.2.4 Images detection 1.2.3 Audio Steganography 1.2.3.1 LSB Coding 1.2.3.2 Phase Coding 1.2.4 Video Steganogrphy 1.2.5 Need and applications of steganography

10 10 10 11 11 11 12 12 13 13 13 14 17 17 17 17 18

2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 3 4

Literature Review TextSteganography:ANovelApproach Digital steganography for information security Digital signature authentication Digital Watermarking Steganography of plain text and image Morden Techniques of steganography

19 19 22 23 23 25 26 29 31

Multi segment steganography techniques Conclusion

ABSTRACT OF THE PAPER

In this paper I am going to introduce steganography and types of steganography mainly used in recent time. Mainly I am working on image steganography .first I am introduce some

concept on different types of steganography. Then I describe different techniques (classic as wellas modern techniques) of Image steganography. Then how it different from cryptography. In this

paper I am describing the complexity of the stego key serch.I am showing the Drawbacks of multi segment stganography techniques which used code table mechanism.

6 LIST OF FIGURES FIG.NO. TITLES

PAGE NO.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Overview of steganography process Steganography type diagram Text data Input image 15 Output image Output image by notepad 16 Covered data 1.jpg 36.1KB stego.jpg 36.3KB stegomessage 39.2KB LIST OF TABLE 1 code table

9 10 15 16

17 22

1. INTRODUCTIONThe word steganography is derived from the Greek words stegos meaning cover and grafia meaning writing ,defining it as covered writing . Steganography is one such prosecurity innovation in which secret data is embedded in a cover . The notion of data hiding or steganography was first introduced with the example of prisoners' secret message by Simmons in 1983 .

In ancient Greece, people used invisible ink or even the messengers body to write down messages and then hide them with wax- as a stego medium. Even earlier than the Greek use, there have been several dated messages found and embedded within the hieroglyphics of ancient Egyptian monuments . All these are methods used in previous years are also known as physical steganography. Nowadays we use different computer file formats to cover the message that the sender wants to hide. The medium used to carry the message is known as the cover medium. The medium after embedding or hiding the message is known as a stego medium. There are four basic cover media used nowadays for steganography purposes. The following formula (Equation 1.1) provides the idea behind the Steganographic process :

Cover medium + Hidden data + Stego_key = Stego_medium

fig 1.1

This process is shown in Figure 1.1. Assume three different characters for example Bob, Alice and Eve. Suppose Bob want to send a secret message M to Alice. So he can use one of the steganography techniques and hide the message. To increase complexity, he can also combine cryptography technique with steganography. Then Bob needs to send this stego data file to Alice. Alice when receive this stego data file, she needs to extract the original message by applying the decoding technique. If any eavesdropper, Eve, receive the stego data file the she is unable to detect that message is hidden in the stego file. This is the main advantage of using steganography method in communications as any third person cannotdetect that the conversation is going on. There are few well-known text steganography methods. One is to insert the secret message into a webpage or inside a markup language. In this method the message is hidden using html tags . In line

8 shift text steganography and in word shift text steganography the horizontal and vertical space between the two words is used to hide the message. The toughest text steganography technique is feature specific encoding, in which the characteristic of the letter is used to hide the message. There are some feature specific text steganography techniques available for different languages, for example : hindi characters .

Figure 1.. Overview of steganography process

1.1 Steganography vs Cryptography

Steganography and cryptography are closely related .Cryptography scrambles the message so they cant understand. Steganography hide the message that there no existence of the message in the first place , When steganography fails and the message can be detected ,it is still of no use as it is encrypted using cryptography techniques

1.2 Types of Steganography4 types of Steganography techniques are used that is text steganography ,image steganography,audio and video steganography.

steganography

Text

Audio Image Video

Fig 2 Steganography type diagram

10

1.2.1Text SteganographyText steganography can be achieved by altering the text formatting, or by altering certain characteristics of textual elements (e.g., characters). The goal in the design of coding methods is to develop alterations that are reliably decodable (even in the presence of noise) yet largely indiscernible to the reader. These criteria, reliable decoding and minimum visible change, are somewhat conflicting; herein lies the challenge in designing document marking techniques. The document format file is a computer file describing the document content and page layout (or formatting), using standard format description languages such as PostScript2, TeX, @off, etc. It is from this format file that the image - what the reader sees - is generated. The three coding techniques that we propose illustrate different approaches rather than form <an exhaustive list of document marking techniques. The techniques can be used either separately or jointly. Each technique enjoys certain advantages or applicability as we discuss below.

1.2.1.1Line-Shift Coding
This is a method of altering a document by vertically shifting the locations of text lines to encode the document uniquely. This encoding may be applied either to the format file or to the bitmap of a page image. The embedded codeword may be extracted from the format file or bitmap. In certain cases this decoding can be accomplished without need of the original image, since the original is known to have uniform line spacing between adjacent lines within a paragraph.

1.2.1.2 Word-Shift Coding

This is a method of altering a document by horizontally shifting the locations of words within text lines to encode the document uniquely. This encoding can be applied to either the format file or to the bitmap of a page image. Decoding may be performed from the format file or bitmap. The method is applicable only to documents with variable spacing between adjacent words. Variable spacing in text documents is commonly used to distribute white space when justifying text. Because of this variable spacing, decoding requires the original image - or more specifically, the spacing between words in the un-encoded document.

1.2.1.3 Feature Coding This is a coding method that is applied either to a format file or to a bitmap image of a document. The image is examined for chosen text features, and those features are altered, or not altered, depending on the codeword. Decoding requires the original image, or more specifically,

11 a specification of the change in pixels at a feature. There are many possible choices of text features; here, we choose to alter upward, vertical endlines - that is the tops of letters, b, d, h, etc. These endlines are altered by extending or shortening their lengths by one (or more) pixels, but otherwise not changing the endline feature .

1.2.1.4 Implementation
In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct: and e'en to tell It were no easy task, how savage wild That forest, how robust and rough its growth, Which to remember only, my dismay Renews, in bitterness not far from death. Yet to discourse of what there good befell, All else will I relate discover'd there. How first I enter'd it I scarce can say In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct: and e'en to tell It were no easy task, how savage wild That forest, how robust and rough its growth, Which to remember only, my dismay Renews, in bitterness not far from death. Yet to discourse of what there good befell, All else will I relate discover'd there. How first I enter'd it I scarce can say

06081913030629170827

meet at dawn

12 1.2.2 Image steganography Hiding information inside images is a popular technique nowadays. An image with a secret message inside can easily be spread over the World Wide Web or in newsgroups. The use of steganography in newsgroups has been researched by German steganographic expert Niels Provos, who created a scanning cluster which detects the presence of hidden messages inside images that were posted on the net. However, after checking one million images, no hidden messages were found, so the practical use of steganography still seems to be limited. To hide a message inside an image without changing its visible properties, the cover source can be altered in noisy areas with many color variations, so less attention will be drawn to the modifications. The most common methods to make these alterations involve the usage of the leastsignificant bit or LSB, masking, filtering and transformations on the cover image. These techniques can be used with varying degrees of success on different types of image files.

1.2.2.1 Least Significant Bits Many stego tools make use of least significant bit (LSB). For example, 11111111 is an 8-bit binary number. The rightmost bit is called the LSB because changing it has the least effect on the value of the number. The idea is that the LSB of every byte can be replaced with little change to the overall file. The binary data of the secret message is broken up and then inserted into the LSB of each pixel in the image file. 1.2.2.2 Hiding the data Using the Red, Green, Blue (RGB) model a stego tool makes a copy of an image palette, say, an 8-bit image. The copy is rearranged so that colors near each other in the RGB model are near each other in the palette. The LSB of each pixels 8-bit binary number is replaced with one bit from the hidden message. A new RGB color in the copied palette is found. A new 8-bit binary number of the new RGB color in the original palette is found. The pixel is changed to the 8-bit binary number of the new RGB color. 1.2.2.3 Recovering the data The stego tool finds the 8-bit binary number of each pixels RGB color. The LSB of each pixel's 8-bit binary number is one bit of the hidden data file. Each LSB is then written to an output file.

13 A simplified example with an 8-bit image 1 pixel: (00 01 10 11)

white red green blue Insert 0011: (00 00 11 11)

white white blue blue

As can be seen from the example, with an 8-bit image, the cover image must be carefully selected since LSB manipulation is not as forgiving because of the color limitations. To hide information in the LSBs of each byte of a 24-bit image, it is possible to store 3 bits in each pixel. A simplified example with a 24-bit image 1 pixel:

(00100111 11101001 11001000)

Insert 101:

(00100111 11101000 11001001)

red green blue

LSB insertion works well with gray-scale images as well. It is possible to hide data in the least and second least significant bits and the human eye would still not be able to discern it.

14 Unfortunately LSB insertion is vulnerable to slight image manipulation such as cropping and compression. For example, converting a GIF or a BMP image, which reconstructs the original message exactly (lossless compression), to a JPEG format, which does not (lossy compression), and then converting back, can destroy the data in the LSBs. If NO. of least significant bits increases then the hiding capacity increasesbut image degrades. 1.4.1.4 Images detection

Examine color palette Size of the image Differences: Format Last modified date

LSB makes use of BMP images, since they use lossless compression. Unfortunately to be able to hide a secret message inside a BMP file, one would require a very large cover image. Nowadays, BMP images of 800 600 pixels are not often used on the Internet and might arouse suspicion . For this reason, LSB steganography has also been developed for use with other image file formats.

15 5. Text inside a image In this techniques we hide secret text data inside a jpeg image .

Figure3 Text data

Figure4 Input image

16

Fig 5 out put image

The input image and output image are both looking same but if you open the output image by note pad then you see the secrete data inside the image.

Fig 6 Out put image by notepad

17

Fig 7 Covered data 1.jpg 36.1KB

stego.jpg 36.3KB

stegomessage 39.2KB

1.2.3

Audio steganography

In audio steganography, secret message is embedded into digitized audio signal which result slight altering of binary sequence of the corresponding audio file. There are several methods are available for audio steganography. We are going to have a brief introduction on some of them. 1.2.3.1 LSB Coding Sampling technique followed by Quantization converts analog audio signal to digital binary sequence. In this technique LSB of binary sequence of each sample of digitized audio file is replaced with binary equivalent of secret message. 1.2.3.2 Phase Coding Human Auditory System (HAS) cant recognize the phase change in audio signal as easy it can recognize noise in the signal. The phase coding method exploits this fact. This technique encodes the secret message bits as phase shifts in the phase spectrum of a digital signal, achieving an inaudible encoding in terms of signal-to- noise ratio.

1.2.4Video Steganography When information is hidden inside video the program or person hiding the information will usually use the DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) method.DCT works by slightly changing the each of the images in the video, only so much though so its isnt noticeable by the human eye. To be more precise about how DCT works, DCT alters values of certain parts of the images, it usually rounds them up. For example if part of an image has a value of 6.667 it will round it up to 7. Steganography in Videos is similar to that of Steganography in Images, apart from information is hidden in each

18 frame of video. When only a small amount of information is hidden inside of video it generally isnt noticeable at all, however the more information that is hidden the more noticeable it will become.

1.2.5 Need and applications of steganography There has been a rapid growth of interest in this subject over the last two years, and for two main reasons. Firstly, the publishing and broadcasting industries have become interested in techniques for hiding encrypted copyright marks and serial numbers in digital images, audio recordings, books and multimedia products; an appreciation of new market opportunities created by digital distribution is coupled with a fear that digital works could be too easy to copy. Secondly, moves by various governments to restrict the availability of encryption services have motivated people to study methods by which private messages can be embedded in seemingly innocuous cover messages. There are a number of other applications driving interest in the subject of information hiding: Military and intelligence agencies require unobtrusive communications. Even if the content is encrypted, the detection of a signal on a modern battlefield may lead rapidly to an attack on the signaler. For this reason, military communications use techniques such as spread spectrum modulation or meteor scatter transmission to make signals hard for the enemy to detect or jam. Criminals also place great value on unobtrusive communications. Their preferred technologies include prepaid mobile phones, mobile phones which have been modified to change their identity frequently, and hacked corporate switchboards through which calls can be rerouted. Law enforcement and counter intelligence agencies are interested in understanding these technologie s and their weaknesses, so as to detect and trace hidden messages. Recent attempts by some governments to limit online free speech and the civilian use of cryptograph y have spurred people concerned about liberties to develop techniques for anonymous communications on the net, including anonymous remailers and Web proxies. Schemes for digital elections and digital cash make use of anonymous communication techniques. Marketers use email forgery techniques to send out huge numbers of unsolicited messages while avoiding responses from angry users.

19

Other applications for steganography include the automatic monitoring of radio advertisements, wher e it would be convenient to have an automated system to verify that adverts are played as contracted; indexing of video mail, where we may want to embed comments in the content; and medical safety, where current image formats such as DICOM separate image data from the text (such as the patient's name, date and physician), with the result that the link between image and patient occasionally gets mangled by protocol converters. 2 Literature Review 2.1Text Steganography: A Novel ApproachProposed by-Debnath Bhattacharyya, Poulami Das, Samir Kumar Bandyopadhyay, and Tai-hoon Kim AbstractA security model is proposed which imposes the concept of secrecy over privacy for text messages. This model proposed of combines cryptography and steganography, with extra layer. This newly introduce extra layer of security changes the format of normal encrypted message and the security layer follow its encrypted message. IntroductionClassical cryptography is one of the ways to secure plain text messages. Along with that at the time of data transmission, security is also implemented by introducing the concept of steganography, watermarking, etc. In this types of combined approach, there exits some drawbacks. In remote networking, at the time of transmission of hidden encrypted text message, if the eavesdroppers get the track of the hidden text, then they could easily get the encrypted text. Now breaking of encrypted text message can be achieved by applying some brute force technique. So, there remains some probability of snooping of information. So, this type of techniques incurs another level of security which can route the Cryptanalyzer or Steganalyzer in a different direction. In this work, two new methods namely code_matrix mapping and matrix_pix mapping are used to employ the above mentioned extra layer of security and in this paper we have considered the image file format as our covering multimedia object. But, the same technique can be applied for other multimedia file formats. Related worksLeast significant bit (LSB) insertion is a common and simple approach to embed information in a cover object. For images as a covering media, the LSB of a pixel is replaced with an Ms bit. If

20 we choose a 24-bit image as cover, we can store 3 bits in each pixel by modifying the LSBs of R, G and B array. To the human eye, the resulting stego image will look identical to the cover image. Hiding data in the features of images is also an important technique which uses the LSB modification concept. In this method, to hide data in an image the least significant bits (LSB) of each pixel is modified sequentially in the scan lines across the image in raw image format with the binary data. The portion, where the secret message is hidden is degraded while the rest remain untouched. An attacker can easily recover the hidden message. S. K. Bandyopadhyay, Debnath Bhattacharyya, Swarnendu Mukherjee, Debashis Ganguly, Poulami Das in 2008 has also proposed a heuristic approach to hide huge amount of data using LSB steganography technique. In their method, they have first encoded the data and afterwards the encoded data is hidden behind a cover image by modifying the least significant bits of each pixel of the cover image. The resultant stego-image was distortion less. Also, they have given much emphasis on space complexity of the data hiding technique. WorkUsing asymmetric key cryptography which means different keys are needed to encrypt and decrypt the data. Here we have divide the domain of the key selection into different sub domains (a random prime number, a randomly generated number, decimal value of the pixel (only R) from the cover picture). In this approach we have given strength on division of the domain together with the key length. According to our concept, we encrypt the original text message letter by letter applying a function which involves certain mathematical operations using corresponding letters and also numbers from the original image. Then, we use two public keys and one private key for encryption and decryption. These keys are generated randomly following some constraints and equations. For encryption and decryption, we have used a mathematical operation called Multiplicative Modulo in between the text and the generated keys. The used mathematical relation is given below

C = remainder of (a*b)/p .

(Say, a, b are any numbers and p be a prime number such that 0 < a, b < p.). This technique constitutes the first layer of Security in our model.

21 Now, in the next attempt we have used one new method code_matrix mapping. In this method, the encrypted code is first is broken digit by digit. Next digits are converted into binary matrices having size DP (Depth of the cover Picture) X x where x gives the resultant code plus 1 where the code is obtained from the encryption procedure of the text. Here, the content of the matrices are not important and it can have any binary value. This approach incurs second layer of Security in our model. After that we have used another new method matrix_pix mapping. In this method the matrices obtained previously are mapped into zone of pixels having area DP X x (in bytes) where again x represents the same (previously mentioned) and DP represents the depth of the picture, by using Steganography (Least Significant Bit of the pixel bytes are modified). Here, also after mapping of each matrix we have left one pixel unchanged after mapping a certain set of matrices (constituting a word) we have left 2 pixels unchanged. This type of operation implements third layer of Security in our work. operation implements third layer of Security in our work. The change in Least Significant Bit in the value of Red-Green-Blue (pixel) is likely to be undetectable by human eye. Even if the hackers could predict that a message is hidden inside the image, then they could at most acquire the matrices. These matrices should be effectively converted to obtain the encrypted data. After this, the encrypted data needs to be decrypted with the use of the private key to obtain a cipher code which has to be again decrypted to finally retrieve the original text. So, for the hackers it is very difficult to salvage the data crossing these Multiple Layers of Security. ResultDuring our implementation phase, we have tested our algorithm for different sets of images as well as text messages. For each and every normal bitmap images the proposed technique is working fine. We have also calculated that using a standard 1024 X 768 bitmap image, we can hide approximately 23130 numbers of characters. So, to illustrate our model, we are showing only one satisfactory experimental result due to the limitation of space.

Cover Image [34748 Bytes

Final Image [34748 Bytes]

22

2.2 Digital steganography for information security The application of digital steganography include digital watermarking for copyright protection of multimedia data, digital signature authentication and validation of electronic documents, digital data storage, and linkage for binding digitized photographs with personal attribute information, as well secure communication of multimedia data. Data Mark Technologies(DMT) have developed four steganography products based on their patent pending algorithms[3,4,5] as follows: 1. Secure Communication(steg comm) 2. Digital Signature Authentication(steg sign) 3. Digital Watermarking(steg mark) 4. Digital Storage and Linkage(steg safe)

1. Secure Communication StegCommTM is a state-of-the-art digital steganography software package developed by DMT for confidential multimedia communication. The software allows the user to select a multimedia data file or "container" for embedding hidden text, audio sequence, video clip, or any form of data file. The contents of the text message are hashed with those of the container file to produce a key file. The key file is also known as a Stegfile. Many conventional steganography techniques simply incorporate a combination of cryptography and steganography. The cryptography operation is used first to scramble the hidden text. For steganography operation, the scrambled data is then inserted or "hidden" into the least significant bits (LSB) of the container data. One of the common drawbacks of these techniques is that the container file has to be of certain size greater than the hidden file. Other limitations include the knowledge required on the exact location of the hidden text, the limited container data formats, and the export restriction of using encryption algorithms to certain countries. These difficulties are circumvented by the use of StegComm. 1. First, StegCommTM utilises a patent-pending lossless algorithm (the HTTY algorithm) that does not affect the data integrity of the container file. 2. Second, the program is completely independent of the size of the container file relative to that of the hidden file. 3. Third, as steganography is a relatively new field, there are currently no export restrictions on products that incorporate this technology.

23 Another key advantage of the lossless algorithm is the option to select any digital data file from a webpage on the Internet. As the algorithm does not corrupt or overwrite the container file, multimedia data posted on any webspage, such as images (JPEG, GIF), video clips (AVI, MPEG) or audio files (WAV, MIDI), can be selected as the container file. Furthermore, customised container files, such as the voices and images of the sender captured via video conferencing, can be generated very easily. Therefore, the probability of knowing which container file used during encoding is infinitesimally small. It is almost like "finding a needle in a haystack. 2.3DIGITAL SIGNATURE AUTHENTICATION StegSignTM is a software product specifically developed by DMT to prevent malicious tampering of private and confidential documents. These documents include company memos, Emails and letters. StegSignTM can provide a wide spectrum of applications in the e-commerce sector. Such ecommerce applications include business transactions between banks and customers, legal document exchanges between lawyers and clients, and scenarios involving non-repudiation issues. This product will detect any unwarranted tampering and alert the receiver side immediately. A digital signature and a multimedia container password are embedded into the confidential document. The digital signature can be inputted as a handwritten signature or as a personal seal. The container password can either be a normal text string, an image, or a binary file.

2.4 Digital signature authentication StegMarkTM is a digital watermarking software for copyright protection of digital images, music CDs, DVDs, and other forms of multimedia data. In the case of digital images, the files can come from a variety of sources, such as the Internet, digital still cameras, and video cameras. Many digital watermarking techniques in the market embed only a certain number of bits or characters into the image. However, StegMarkTM can embed either a text or image watermark invisibly into an "unlabelled" image. The text watermark can be of many characters, for example, for a colour image of size 512 x 512, more than a few thousand characters may be embedded. The image watermark technique of StegMarkTM is currently the only digital watermarking product available in the market that offers the embedding of a company's logo/trademark into an image. For a 512 x512 image, an image watermark of size up to 128 x 128 can be embedded entirely into the image, without the loss of image integrity. How robust a watermark is depends on whether it can survive various "attacks" that include contrast

24 changes, cropping, scratches, and filtering. However, the image integrity of the "labelled" image must not degrade poorly from an increased level of robustness to these attacks. There are currently many exaggerating claims that some watermarking techniques can survive all kinds of image manipulation attacks. However, many of these attacks will destroy the watermark, simply because the labelled image values with the embedded watermark have now been significantly modified. Obviously, depending on the watermarking techniques, some attacks can be defended more successful than others. StegMarkTM has been tested repeatedly with a number of image attacks that included contrast stretching (reduction and sharpening), pixel defects, low pass and high pass filtering on the image-inimage watermarking technique. The image watermark is able to survive most of these attacks.

Watermarking

Watermarking: is the practice of imperceptibly altering a cover to embed a message about that cover

Watermarking is closely related to steganography, but there are differences between the two:

In watermarking the message is related to the cover

Steganography typically relates to covert point-to-point communication between two parties

Therefore, steganography requires only limited robustness

Watermarking is often used whenever the cover is available to parties

who know the existence of the hidden data and may have an interest in removing it Therefore, watermarking has the additional notion of resilience against attempts to remove the hidden data

25

Watermarks are inseparable from the cover in which they are embedded. Unlike cryptography, watermarks can protect content even after they are decoded.

2.4Steganography of plain text and image Bijoy Bandyopadhyay University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India,
Abstract:

Steganography is the technique of hiding confidential information within a media. The difference between steganography and cryptography is that in steganography the information is hidden but in cryptography the output is scrambled so as to draw the attention. Steganalysis is the process to detect the presence of stegaography.
Keywords:

Steganography,steganalysis, discrete cosine transformation(DCT),Ipv4 header, IP datagram fragmentation.

Introduction:

The use of modern steganography is to hide information into digital multimedia file and also at network packet level. Following elements are required for hiding information into media: 1. The cover media(C) which will hold the hidden information. 2. The secret message(M) which may be plain text, hidden text or any type of data. 3. The stego function(Fe) and its inverse(Fe-1) 4. Inorder to hide or unhide the message an optional stego key(K) or psssword may be used. The stego function operates over cover media and the message (to be hidden) along with a stego-key (optionally) to produce a stego media (S). The schematic of steganographic operation is shown below.

2.5: Digital Watermarking

26 The modern technique of steganography uses the property of media itself to convey a message. The candidates for the digitally embedding message:1. plain text 2. still imagery 3. audio and video 4. IP datagram Still Imagery of Steganography This is the most widely used technique for hiding of the secret message. This steganography exploits weakness of Human Visual System(HVS). Hvs cannot detect variation of luminance of colour vectors at higher frequency of visual spectrum. A picture can be represented by collection of colour pixels. Each of these characteristics can be digitally expressed in terms of 0 and 1.

For example: a 24-bit bitmap will have 8 bits, representing each of the three colour values (red, green, and blue) at each pixel. If we consider just the blue there will be 28 different values of blue. The difference between 11111111 and 11111110 in the value for blue intensity is likely to be undetectable by the human eye.(here the 1 from the right hand side is the LSB). Hence,for human visual system (HVS) then the Least Significant Bit (LSB) can be used for something else other than colour information.

This technique can be directly applied on digital image in bitmap format as well as for the compressed image format like JPEG. Modification of LSB of a cover image in 'bitmap' format . In this method binary equivalent of the message (to be hidden) is distributed among the LSBs of each pixel. For example we will try to hide the character A into an 8-bit color image. We are taking eight consecutive pixels from top left corner of the image. The equivalent binary bit pattern of those pixels may be like this: 00100111 11101001 11001000 00100111 11001000 11101001 11001000 00100111

Then each bit of binary equivalence of letter 'A' i.e. 01100101 are copied serially (from the left hand side) to the LSB's of equivalent binary pattern of pixels, resulting the bit pattern will become like this: 00100110 11101001 11001001 00100110 11001000 11101001

27 11001000 00100111 The only problem with this technique is that it is very vulnerable to attacks such as image compression and formatting.

Apply of LSB technique during discrete cosine transformation (DCT) [4] on cover image. The following steps are followed in this case: 1.The Image is broken into data units each of them consists of 8 x 8 block of pixels. 2.Working from top-left to bottom-right of the cover image, DCT is applied to each pixel of each data unit. 3.After applying DCT, one DCT Coefficient is generated for each pixel in data unit. 4.Each DCT coefficient is then quantized against a reference quantization table. 5. The LSB of binary equivalent the quantized DCT coefficient can be replaced by a bit from secret message. 6. Encoding is then applied to each modified quantized DCT coefficient to produce compressed Stego Image. 2.6OVERVIEW Steganography comes from the Greek words Stegans (Covered) and Graptos (Writing). The origin of steganography is biological and physiological. The term steganography came into use in 1500s after the appearance of Trithemius book on the subject Steganographia. A short overview in this field can be divided into three parts and they are Past, Presentand Future . Past The word Steganography technically means covered or hidden writing. Its ancient origins can be traced back to 440 BC. Although the term steganography was only coined at the end of the 15th century, the use of steganography dates back several millennia. In ancient times, messages were hidden on the back of wax writing tables, written on the stomachs of rabbits, or tattooed on the scalp of slaves. Invisible ink has been in use for centuriesfor fun by children and students and for serious espionage by spies and terrorists . Cryptography became very common place in the middle ages. Secret writing was employed by the Catholic Church in its various struggles down the ages and by the major governments of the time. Steganography was normally used in conjunction with cryptography to further hide secret information . Present The majority of todays steganographic systems uses multimedia objects like image, audio, video etc as cover media because people often transmit digital pictures over email and other Internet

28 communication In modern approach, depending on the nature of cover object, steganography can be divided into five Text Steganography Image Steganography Audio Steganography Video Steganography Protocol Steganography

So, in the modern age so many steganographic techniques have been designed which works with the above concerned objects. More often in todays security advancement, we sometimes come across certain cases in which a combination of Cryptography and Steganography are used to achieve data privacy over secrecy. Various software tools are also available . Future In todays world, we often listen a popular term Hacking. Hacking is nothing but an unauthorized access of data which can be collected at the time of data transmission. With respect to steganography this problem is often taken as Steganalysis . Steganalysis is a process in which a steganalyzer cracks the cover object to get the hidden data. So, whatever be the technique will be developed in future, degree of security related with that has to be kept in mind. It is hoped that Dual Steganography, Steganography along with Cryptography may be some of the future solution for this above mentioned problem. 3.Multi segment steganography techniques Proposed by Fayik Alnawok and Basem Ahmed Faculty of Applied Science, Al Aqsa University, Palestine

Code Table The code table is build up according to the idea of having a random numbers (from 0 to 221), the number 221 comes from that we have 35 characters, and each of them have 6 random codes according to the techniques above. After that each

character will be assigned to six random numbers. Now let the sender and receiver share the password "1234QTR" and the code table, as shown in Table 1.

4.2 Message Hiding In this stage the sender wants to send the message "MESSAGE". First he should decode the message into corresponding code for each character by choosing random character from it list

29 of code words, let the random numbers be 5, 0, 4, 3, 2, 1, 3. So the message becomes 92, 174, 113, 111, 21, 167, 192 and the secret password coding is 142, 69, 170, 217, 117, 65, 80. The next step starting to search the image from the byte 142*10; i.e., from byte 1420 about the value 92 let us found it at byte 1500 we changed the value of the bytes 1497 and 1503 into 1420, or 2/3*1420 or 4/3*1420 these factors have been chosen depends on that we want the new values closer to the original value, the next step we start searching from the byte 690 about the value 174 and we found it at the byte 800, now we change the value of the bytes 797 and 803 into 174 and so on for the reaming characters of the message we are going to hide according to the next pseudo code . 1. Start message hiding. 2. Code the message by using random (code word corresponding to each character of the
Q W E R T Y U I O P A S D F G H J K L Z X C V B N M Space 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Table1. Codes table.

List of Code words 117 168 174 80 65 182 53 177 158 101 203 5 78 34 144 73 42 109 71 140 48 154 195 105 211 47 162 114 142 69 170 217 146 133 147 74 163 128 180 82 115 137 218 23 62 72 200 95 120 59 104 167 28 100 37 52 90 209 39 81 165 14 88 79 213 187 132 43 161 148 7 159 55 85 63 156 212 169 143 201 220 84 139 57 21 150 54 56 131 0 33 98 106 25 76 93 117 135 176 199 96 97 99 116 40 175 196 107 122 185 1 66 10 192 11 58 50 149 210 45 173 123 111 13 138 4 118 155 60 75 204 121 94 49 172 26 164 215 110 206 198 197 125 134 214 189 126 221 171 91 12 130 61 153 127 89 41 83 202 113 86 119 46 145 205 166 9 77 188 112 129 179 38 178 87 27 186 24 181 207 20 8 70 193 67 3 190 209 103 183 216 22 35 17 64 184 102 108 208 16 18 19 6 191 32 160 151 194 44 124 92 30 36 157 51 2 68 136 15 152 29

of the password.

message). 3. Code the password with the first code word from the list of code word corresponding to each
character

4. For i=1 to length(message)

For (j=ith password code * 10 to size of the image) If (byte(j)==code word of ith character of the message) Then stop the loop If(absolute value(byte (j-3)- * ith character of the message)< byte(j-3) ith character of the message) and (absolute value(byte (j-3)- * ith character of the message)< byte(j-3) 4/3 * ith character of the message) Then byte (j-3) = * ith character of the message.

30 Else if (absolute value(byte (j-3) 4/3 * ith character of the message)< byte(j-3) ith character of the message) and (absolute value(byte (j-3) 4/3 * ith character of the message)< byte(j-3) 3/4 * ith character of the message) Then byte (j-3) = 4/3 * ith character of the message. Else byte (j-3) = ith character of the message. Do steps b,c and d for the byte (j+3). 5. If the I equal the length (password) Then i = I mod length (password). 6. End. My question on this algorithm is there is no use of specific pos Ition. Marking specific byte at specific distance. To find the specific position

4.CONCLUSION
Although only some of the main steganographic techniques were discussed in this paper, one can see that there exists a large selection of approaches to hiding information in images. All the major image file formats have different methods of hiding messages, with different strong and weak points respectively. Where one technique lacks in payload capacity, the other lacks in robustness. For example, the patchwork approach has a very high level of robustness against most type of attacks, but can hide only a very small amount of information. Least significant bit (LSB) in both BMP and GIF makes up for this, but both approaches result in suspicious files that increase the probability of detection when in the presence of a warden.

31 5 REFERENCES

[1] Bhattacharyya, Poulami Das,Samir Kumar Bandyopadhyay, and Tai-hoon Kim Text Steganography: A Novel ApproachProposed Debnath. [2] Fayik Alnawok and Basem Ahmed Multi segment steganography techniques2007 Faculty of Applied Science, Al Aqsa University, Palestine [3] Jamil, T., Steganography: The art of hiding information is plain sight, IEEE Potentials, 18:01, 1999 . [4] Moerland, T., Steganography and Steganalysis, Leiden Institute of Advanced Computing Science, www.liacs.nl/home/ tmoerl/privtech.pdf. [5] Silman, J., Steganography and Steganalysis: An Overview, , 2001 .

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