A novel active warden steganographic attack for next-generation steganography

Abstract

Digital steganography is often divided into two categories of research: steganographer and attacker, where a steganographer attempts to successfully hide the existence of hidden data and an attacker attempts to uncover and destroy said data. Often steganographic attacks utilize passive techniques, where the attacker monitors messages and alters or destroys the cover media only if the media is suspected to contain a message. Passive attacks are much more prevalent than active attacks for a variety of reasons. Generally passive attacks are more efficient and effective in determining the existence of hidden data in a given cover media, however, most passive attacks are not generic enough to detect the presence of a hidden message outside of a very small subset of steganographic algorithms. Conversely, current active attacks are very cost effective and often severely degrade or destroy the quality of the cover media. In this paper, we propose a novel active steganographic attack called the Discrete Spring Transform (DST). The concept of the DST attack is that of likening the cover media to a spring, in that it can be physically altered or manipulated in a manner of ways, while the basic structure and integrity of the spring is preserved despite these alterations. Since many steganographic schemes rely on the fact that the cover media remains somewhat stable the DST is effective in destroying the stego media for such types of steganographic algorithms. It follows that the DST is an effective and highly adaptable active attack that can be applied to a variety of cover media, including video. We will demonstrate that the attack is capable of defeating next-generation steganographic algorithms, including motion-vector steganography and RST-resilient algorithms by increasing the Bit Error Rate (BER) of the steganographic algorithm to approximately 0.5 while maintaining the quality of the cover media, where the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the image-derived media always remains above 30db.