Stega Covered, from the Greek root Stegos noGraphy Writing,from the Greek root Graphia

Steganography means hiding one piece of data within another.

Since everyone can read, encoding text in neutral sentences is doubtfully effective
Since Everyone Can Read, Encoding Text In Neutral Sentences Is Doubtfully Effective

Secret inside

Modern steganography uses the opportunity of hiding information into digital multimedia files and also at the network packet level. Hiding information into a media requires following elements. The cover media(C) that will hold the hidden data The secret message (M), may be plain text, cipher text or any type of data The stego function (Fe) and its inverse (Fe-1) An optional stego-key (K) or password may be used to hide and unhide the message.

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.

Text / WebPages
Images Audio

Video

In this technique the message is hidden within a plain text file using different schemes like use of selected characters, extra white spaces of the cover text etc.

Techniques

Use of a codebook Layout of texts Every Nth character Use of whitespaces and newlines

Audio data hiding method provides the most effective way to protect privacy. Key aspect of embedding text in audio files is that, no extra bytes are generated for embedding. Hence it is more comfortable totransmit huge amount of data using audio signal.

LSB coding
Parity coding Phase coding

Spread Spectrum
Echo Hiding

Images are the most popular cover objects used for steganography. In the domain of digital images many different image file formats exist, most of them for specific applications. For these different image file formats, different steganographic algorithms exist.

Three Methods
LSB substitution Blocking Palette Modification

Least significant bit (LSB) insertion is a common and simple approach to embed information in an image file. In this method the LSB of a byte is replaced with an Ms bit. This technique works good for image, audio and video steganography. To the human eye, the resulting image will look identical to the cover object.

For example, if we consider image steganography then the letter A can be hidden in three pixels (assuming no compression). The original raster data for 3 pixels (9 bytes) may be (00100111 11101001 11001000) (00100111 11001000 11101001) (11001000 00100111 11101001) The binary value for A is 10000001.

Original Image Inserting the binary value for A in the three pixels would result in (00100111 11101000 11001000) (00100110 11001000 11101000) (11001000 00100111 11101001)

Stego Image

Video Steganography is a technique to hide any kind of files in any extension into a carrying Video file. This project is the application developed to embed any kind of data(File) in another file, which is called carrier file. The carrier file must be a video file. It is concerned with embedding information in an innocuous cover media in a secure and robust manner.

Steganalysis is the practice of attacking steganography methods for the detection, extraction, destruction and manipulation of the hidden data in a stego object.

Stego only attack: only stego object is available for analysis. Known cover attack: both cover and stego are known. Known message attack: in some cases message is known and analyzing the stego object pattern for this embedded message may help to attack similar systems. Chosen stego attack: steganographic algorithm and stego object are known. Chosen message attack: here steganalyst creates some sample stego objects from many steganographic tools for a chosen message and analyses these stego objects with the suspected one and tries to find the algorithm used. Known stego attack: cover object and the steganographic tool used are known.

Visual attacks: By analyzing the images visually, like considering the bit
images and try to find the difference visually in these single bit images.

Structural attacks: The format of data file often changes as the data to be
hidden is embedded, identifying these characteristic structural changes can detect the existence of image, for example in palette based steganography the palette of image is changed before embedding data to reduce the number of colors so that the adjacent pixel color difference should be very less. This shows that groups of pixels in a palette have the same color which is not the case in normal images.

Statistical attacks: In these type of attacks the statistical analyses of the

images by some mathematical formulas is done and the detection of hidden data is done based on these statistical results. Generally, the hidden message is more random than the original data of the image thus finding the formulae to know the randomness reveals the existence of data.

Usage in modern printers Steganography is used by some modern printers, including HP and Xerox brand color laser printers. Tiny yellow dots are added to each page. The dots are barely visible and contain encoded printer serial numbers, as well as date and time stamps

When one considers that messages could be encrypted steganographically in e-mail messages, particularly e-mail spam, the notion of junk e-mail takes on a whole new light. Coupled with the "chaffing and winnowing" technique, a sender could get messages out and cover their tracks all at once. In October 2001, the New York Times published an article claiming that al-Qaeda had used steganography to encode messages into images, and then transported these via e-mail and possibly via USENET to prepare and execute the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

In 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that the Russian foreign intelligence service uses customized steganography software for embedding encrypted text messages inside image files for certain communications with "illegal agents" (agents under non-diplomatic cover) stationed abroad