Approaches to obtaining fingerprints of steganography tools which embed message in fixed positions

Abstract

Recently, more and more steganography tools are exploited to embed malicious code into images by attackers, which bring harm to society. Thus, it has been a tricky problem, for which needs to detect the stego-images correctly. Signature detection, an effective method was proposed to solve this problem by identifying the fingerprints of steganography tool that are left in the stego-images. Unfortunately, extracting the fingerprints of steganography tools from the stego-images is a troublesome job. Few researchers pay attention to it and realize it. In this report, we discuss some approaches to obtaining fingerprints of steganography tools which embed message in fixed positions. Three main cases will be analyzed, including embedding message in the reserved positions of the image file header, embedding message in the sequential LSBs (least significant bits) of the image file data and embedding message in the redundant positions behind the image file tail. For each case, we summarize a general approach of fingerprint extraction and its effectiveness has been confirmed through the test on some typical steganography tools.