Top Banner
Image Steganography Page 1 Acknowledgement I would like to express my deep gratitude towards my project guide Dr. Ashish Khare for his able guidance and supervision which helped me for starting this project. I am extremely grateful and remain indebted to him for being a source of inspiration and for his constant support in the idea and starting of the project. I am thankful to him for his constant constructive criticism and invaluable suggestions, which benefited me a lot while starting the project on “Image Steganography” I would also like to thank to Prof R.R.Tewari and Dr. T.J. Siddhiquie who were directly and indirectly instrument in enabling me to stay committed for the project. I am also very much thankful to my parents and other family members for being such a great source of inspiration of mine. Ashesh Mishra M.Sc.IIIrd Sem(2011-12) Computer Science
13

92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Apr 12, 2015

Download

Documents

Nitin Jain

Image Steganography
Welcome message from author
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
Page 1: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 1

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my deep gratitude towards my project guide Dr. Ashish

Khare for his able guidance and supervision which helped me for starting this

project. I am extremely grateful and remain indebted to him for being a source of

inspiration and for his constant support in the idea and starting of the project.

I am thankful to him for his constant constructive criticism and invaluable

suggestions, which benefited me a lot while starting the project on “Image

Steganography”

I would also like to thank to Prof R.R.Tewari and Dr. T.J. Siddhiquie who were

directly and indirectly instrument in enabling me to stay committed for the

project.

I am also very much thankful to my parents and other family members for being

such a great source of inspiration of mine.

Ashesh Mishra

M.Sc.IIIrd Sem(2011-12)

Computer Science

Page 2: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 2

Objective

Subject of steganography, mainly focused on embedding text data in digital images. 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. The other goal of steganography is to avoid drawing suspicion to the existence of a hidden message. This approach of information hiding technique has recently become important in a number of application areas. This project has following objectives:

To product 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.

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.

Page 3: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 3

Introduction

The word steganography is derived from the Greek words “stegos” meaning “cover” and “grafia” meaning “writing” defining it as “covered writing”. Steganography refers to the science of invisible" communication. Steganographic techniques strive to hide the very presence of the message itself from an observer. The general idea of hiding some information in digital content has a wider class of applications that go beyond steganography. Steganography is the process of hiding a secret message within a larger one in such a way that someone cannot know the presence or contents of the hidden message. Although related, Steganography is not to be confused with Encryption, which is the process of making a message unintelligible—Steganography attempts to hide the existence of communication. Steganography is the practice of hiding private or sensitive information within something that appears to be nothing out to the usual.

Page 4: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 4

History of Steganography

440 B.C. Herodotus recounts the story of Histaiaeus, who wanted to encourage Aristagoras of Miletus to revolt against the Persian king. In order to securely convey his plan. Histiaeus shaved the head of his most trusted slave and tattooed it with a message which disappeared after the hair had regrown. To instigate a revolt against Persians. The messenger, apparently carrying nothing contentious, could travel freely. Arriving at his destination, he shaved his head and pointed it at the recipient.

1st and 2nd World Wars German spies used invisible ink to print very small dots on letters. Microdots – Blocks of text or images scaled down to the size of a regular

dot.

Early Sreganography Pictographs: e.g., Sherlock Holmes’s Dancing Men.

“Come Here At Once”

Although steganography is an ancient subject, the modern formulation of it is often given in terms of the prisoner’s problem proposed by Simmons, where two inmates wish to communicate in secret to hatch an escape plan. All of their communication passes through a warden who will throw them in solitary confinement should she suspect any covert communication. The warden, who is free to examine all communication exchanged between the inmates, can either be passive or active. A passive warden simply examines the communication to try and determine if it potentially contains secret information.

Page 5: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 5

If she suspects a communication to contain hidden information, a passive warden takes note of the detected covert communication, reports this to some outside party and lets the message through without blocking it. An active warden, on the other hand, will try to alter the communication with the suspected hidden information deliberately, in order to remove the information.

Applications

Image Steganography has many applications, especially in today’s modern, high-tech world. Privacy and anonymity is a concern for most people on the internet. Image Steganography allows for two parties to communicate secretly and

covertly.

It allows for some morally-conscious people to safely whistle blow on internal actions.

It allows for copyright protection on digital files using the message as a

digital watermark.

One of the other main uses for Image Steganography is for the transportation of high-level or top-secret documents between international governments.

Image Steganography has many legitimate uses; it can also be quite nefarious. It can be used by hackers to send viruses and Trojans to compromise machines, and also by terrorists and other organizations that rely on covert operations to communicate secretly and safely.

Page 6: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 6

Basic Structure of Steganography

Steganography is the practice of hiding private or sensitive information within something that appears to be nothing out to the usual.

The basic structure of Steganography is made up of three components:

1. Carrier

2. Message

3. Key

Carrier - The carrier can be a painting, a digital image, an mp3, even a

TCP/IP packet among other things. It is the object that will ‘carry’ the

hidden message.

Message - The message (hidden) is being carried by the object (carrier).

Key - A key is used to decode/decipher/discover the hidden message. This

can be anything from a password, a pattern, a black-light, or even lemon

juice.

Page 7: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 7

Steganography versus Cryptography

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 there is any hidden information, therefore the person will not attempt to decrypt the information. Steganography differs from cryptography in the sense that where cryptography focuses on keeping the contents of a message secret, steganography focuses on keeping the existence of a message secret . Steganography and cryptography are both ways to protect information from unwanted parties but neither technology alone is perfect and can be compromised. Once the presence of hidden information is revealed or even suspected, the purpose of steganography is partly defeated. The strength of steganography can thus be amplified by combining it with cryptography.

Steganography Crypyography

Hide, Without altering Obfuscates the fact of

communication, not the data Preventative – deter attacks

Alter, without hiding Obfuscates the data, not fact of

the communication Curative - defends attacks

Two other technologies that are closely related to steganography are watermarking and fingerprinting. These technologies are mainly concerned with the protection of intellectual property, thus the algorithms have different requirements than steganography.

Page 8: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 8

Different kinds of steganography

Almost all digital file formats can be used for steganography, but the formats that are more suitable are those with a high degree of redundancy. Redundancy can be defined as the bits of an object that provide accuracy far greater than necessary for the object’s use and display. The redundant bits of an object are those bits that can be altered without the alteration being detected easily . Image and audio files especially comply with this requirement, while research has also uncovered other file formats that can be used for information hiding.

Page 9: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 9

Image Steganography

Image definition

To a computer, an image is a collection of numbers that constitute different light intensities in different areas of the image. This numeric representation forms a grid and the individual points are referred to as pixels. Most images on the Internet consists of a rectangular map of the image’s pixels (represented as bits) where each pixel is located and its colour. These pixels are displayed horizontally row by row. An image is a rectangular grid of pixels. It has a definite height and a

definite width counted in pixels.

Each pixel has a color. The color is a 32-bit integer. The first eight bits determine the redness of the pixel, the next eight bits the greenness, the next eight bits the blueness, and the remaining eight bits the transparency of the pixel.

• We can think of an image as a function f.

• f: R2 R – f (x, y) gives the intensity at position (x, y) – Realistically, we expect the image only to be defined over a

rectangle, with a finite range: • f: [a,b]x[c,d] [0,1]

• A color image is just three functions pasted together. We can write this as

a “vector-valued” function:

Page 10: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 10

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.

Image Steganography techniques

There have been many techniques for hiding information or messages in

images in such a manner that the alterations made to the imag.

Image steganography techniques can be divided into two groups:

1) Image Domain

2) Transform Domain

The Common approaches are:

1) Least significant bit insertion (LSB)

2) Masking and filtering

3) Transform techniques

Page 11: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 11

Least significant bit insertion (LSB)

Least significant bits (LSB) insertion is a simple approach to embedding

information in image file.

The simplest steganographic techniques embed the bits of the message

directly into least significant bit plane of the cover-image in a deterministic

sequence.

Used in BMP and GIF images.

Masking and filtering

Masking and filtering techniques, usually restricted to 24 bits and gray scale

images, hide information by marking an image, in a manner similar to paper

watermarks.

The techniques performs analysis of the image, thus embed the

information in significant areas so that the hidden message is more integral

to the cover image than just hiding it in the noise level.

Transform Techniques

Transform techniques embed the message by modulating coefficients in a

transform domain, such as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) used in

JPEG compression, Discrete Fourier Transform, or Wavelet Transform.

These methods hide messages in significant areas of the cover-image, which

make them more robust to attack.

Transformations can be applied over the entire image, to block through out

the image, or other variants

Page 12: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 12

.

Image Compression

In images there are two types of compression: lossy and lossless. Both methods save storage space, but the procedures that they implement differ. Lossy compression creates smaller files by discarding excess image data from the original image. It removes details that are too small for the human eye to differentiate, resulting in close approximations of the original image, although not an exact duplicate. An example of an image format that uses this compression technique is JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group). Lossless compression, on the other hand, never removes any information from the original image, but instead represents data in mathematical formulas. The original image’s integrity is maintained and the decompressed image output is bit-by-bit identical to the original image input. The most popular image formats that use lossless compression is GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) and 8-bit BMP (a Microsoft Windows bitmap file).

Compression plays a very important role in choosing which steganographic algorithm to use. Lossy compression techniques result in smaller image file sizes, but it increases the possibility that the embedded message may be partly lost due to the fact that excess image data will be removed. Lossless compression though, keeps the original digital image intact without the chance of lost, although it does not compress the image to such a small file size. Different steganographic algorithms have been developed for both of these compression types and will be explained in the following sections.

Page 13: 92523945 Image Steganography Project Report

Image Steganography Page 13

Future Work

As this project is get done only on introductory level, so lots of further work

required to complete this project titled as “Image Steganography (A

technique to hide information within image file) ”

I decided to follow particularly Least significant bit insertion (LSB)

approach in order