MESSAGE CONCEALMENT

USING
STEGANOGRAPHY

Guided By:-
Presented By:
Ms. Sumeet Kaur
Sukhpreet Kaur
Lecturer M.Tech
(Part Time) Deptt.of CE
5th Sem
Yadavindra College of Engg.
07MCP013
• 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.
• There exists a large variety of steganographic techniques some are
more complex than others and all of them have respective strong
and weak points .
• In this report I have studied a different types of algorithms available
for image steganography and a comparison of them is prepared.
• I have proposed one LSB based technique as future work
Overview

Introduction to Steganography
Different types of Steganography
Techniques of Image Steganography
Discussion and Analysis of Existing
Techniques
Conclusion & Future Work
• Steganography is the art and science of writing
hidden messages .
• The word "Steganography" is of Greek origin and
means "covered, or hidden writing". Its ancient
origins can be traced back to 440 BC.
• This is in contrast to cryptography, where the
existence of the message itself is not disguised,
but the content is obscured.
Steganography has been widely used in
historical times, especially before
cryptographic systems were developed.
Examples of historical usage include:
• Wax tablets.
• Secret inks.
• Microdots.
• Cipher texts.
 In modern approach, depending on the
nature of cover object, Steganography can be
divided into five types:
Text Steganography
 Image Steganography
 Audio/Video Steganography
 Protocol Steganography
Text Steganography

Line-shift encoding
Word-shift encoding
Feature specific encoding:
Image Steganography

Image Domain
Transform Domain
Audio Steganography

Low-bit Encoding
Phase coding
Spread spectrum
Protocol Steganography
The term protocol steganography
refers to the technique of embedding
information within messages and
network control protocols used in
network transmission
To hide information, straight message insertion may
encode every bit of information in the image or
selectively embed the message in “noisy” areas
that draw less attention—those areas where there
is a great deal of natural color variation. The
message may also be scattered randomly
throughout the image.
Image Domain Techniques

 Least significant bit insertion

 LSB in GIF
 Patchwork

Transform Domain

 JPEG Steganography
 The LSB of a byte is replaced with an M’s bit.
 Works well for image, audio and video Steganography
 Suppose we want to encode letter A (having ASCII value 10000001)in the
following raster data for 3 pixels(9 bytes)
(00100111 11101001 11001000)
(00100111 11001000 11101001)
(11001000 00100111 11101001)
It becomes
(00100111 11101000 11001000)
(00100110 11001000 11101000)
(11001000 00100111 11101001)
Only three bits needs to be changed actually.
On average, LSB requires that only half the bits in an image be changed.
Fig. 1: The cover Fig. 2: The stego-image
image (after A is inserted)
LSB in GIF
•GIF are palette based images
•Each pixel is represented as a single byte and
the pixel data is an index to the colour
palette .
•The colors of the palette are typically ordered
from the most used colour to the least used
colors to reduce lookup time
•one change in the least significant bit of a
pixel, it can result in a completely different
colour since the index to the colour palette is
changed.
•One solution is to use Grayscale images
 Patchwork

This algorithm randomly selects pairs of

pixels on a given image.
The brighter of the two pixels is made
brighter, and the darker one darker.
The contrast change between these two
pixels now forms part of the bit pattern for the
hidden file.
Transform Domain

Transform domain techniques[13] hide data in

mathematical functions that are in
compression algorithms. Discrete Cosine
Transform (DCT ) technique is one of the
commonly used transform domain algorithm
for expressing a waveform as a weighted sum
of cosines.
Transform Domain Contd..
 The DCT transforms a signal from an image
representation into a frequency
representation, by grouping the pixels into 8
× 8 pixel blocks and transforming the pixel
blocks into 64 DCT coefficients each.
Embedding of data is done by altering the
DCT coefficients.
 Following criteria has been proposed for imperceptibility of
an algorithm:

 Invisibility
 Payload capacity
 Robustness against statistical attacks
 Robustness against image manipulation
 Independent of file format
 Unsuspicious files
The levels at which the algorithms satisfy the
requirements are defined as high, medium
and low.
High:-means that the algorithm completely
satisfies the requirement
Low:-low level indicates hat the algorithm has a
weakness in this requirement.
Medium:-medium level indicates that the
requirement depends on outside influences
LSB is the most popular and straight forward
technique for image Steganography but it is
also most vulnerable to attacks.
It is used when secret amount of
information is more.
LSB in GIF can store less data than BMP. Also
minor change in palette is visible.
It is efficient when used with grey scale
images to store small amount of data.
Patchwork technique embed data repeatedly in image so it is robust
against image manipulation.
Its problem is small capacity.
It is suitable for small amount of sensitive information.
JPEG compression is very secure method as stego image’s secret data
is not visible to attacker.
It is very mathematical process and difficult to implement.
it is used to send secret images over internet.
Comparison
Technique LSB in LSB in Jpeg Patchwor
Parameter BMP GIF Compressio k
n
Invisibility High* Medium* High High

Capacity High Medium Medium Low

Robustness Low Low Medium High

Against
Statistical
Attacks
Robustness Low Low Medium High
against image
Manipulation
Independent of Low Low Low High
 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. Like
LSB has high capacity and patchwork has
more security.
Algorithm chosen depend upon application.
Future Work
To design LSB Based Technique
That provide more capacity by using 4-LSB
method.
To increase security encryption will be done
before hiding data.
To use only a subset of pixels for increasing
invisibility.
Proper cover selection will be done to make
file look unsuspicious.
Outline of algorithm
 Select proper cover and convert it into binary form.
 Convert secret message into ASCII format and then in
binary equivalent.
 Encrypt message using some encryption algorithm.
 Take first byte of message and insert it into first byte of
image after image header as 4-LSB.
 Take second byte of data and insert it in the second
byte of image as 4- LSB.
 Then leave next 4 bytes.
 Then insert next character in image.
 Convert image again to image format and send.
 At receiver side just reverse the process.
[1] T Morkel, JHP Eloff and MS Olivier, "An Overview of Image
Steganography," in Proceedings of the
Fifth Annual Information Security South Africa Conference (ISSA2005),
Sandton, South Africa, June/July 2005.
[2] M.Kharrazi,H.T.Sencar and N.Menon ,”image steganography concepts
and practice”,WSPC lecture
notes 2004.
[3] Jamil, T., “Steganography: The art of hiding information is plain
sight”, IEEE Potentials, 18:01, 1999
[4] Wang, H & Wang, S, “Cyber warfare: Steganography vs.
Steganalysis”, Communications of the ACM, 47:10, October 2004.
[5] Anderson, R.J. & Petitcolas, F.A.P., “On the limits of
steganography”, IEEE Journal of selected Areas
in Communications, May 1998.
[6]. Mohammed A.F. Al-Husainy “Image Steganography
by Mapping Pixels to Letters”, Journal of Computer
Science 5 (1): 33-38, 2009.
[7] Curran, K. and K. Bailey, 2003. An evaluation of
image based steganography methods. Int. J. Digital
Evid., 2: 1-40.
[8] Ahsan, K. & Kundur, D., “Practical Data hiding in
TCP/IP”, Proceedings of the Workshop on
Multimedia Security at ACM Multimedia, 2002.
[9] Handel, T. & Sandford, M., “Hiding data in the OSI
network model”, Proceedings of the 1st International
Workshop on Information Hiding, June 1996.
[10] Dunbar, B., “Steganographic techniques and their use
in an Open-Systems environment”, SANs Institute,
January 2002
[11] Moerland, T., “Steganography and Steganalysis”,
Leiden Institute of Advanced Computing
Science,www.liacs.nl/home/ tmoerl/privtech.pdf
[12] Silman, J., “Steganography and Steganalysis: An
Overview”, SANS Institute, 2001.
Thanks