Spatial Desynchronization: A Possible Way to Resist Calibration Attack

Abstract

In this paper$\footnote{The first author gratefully acknowledge the support received from Infosys Technologies Ltd., Bangalore, under the Infosys Fellowship Award}$ a new steganographic algorithm is proposed which can resist the calibration based blind steganalytic attack in JPEG domain steganography. The calibration attack is one of the most successful attacks to break the JPEG steganographic algorithms in recent past. One of the important features for the calibration attack is the prediction of cover image statistics from the stego image. To resist the calibration attack it is necessary to prevent the attacker from successfully predicting the cover image statistics from the stego image. The proposed algorithm is based on a concept of spatial desynchronization which can be used to separate out the embedding domain from channel domain. This domain separation helps to resist the prediction of cover statistics from stego image because the calibration of macroscopic properties become useless if embedding domain is different from channel domain. It is experimentally shown that the proposed algorithm has relatively high payload and is relatively less detectable against the calibration based blind steganalytic attacks than the existing JPEG domain steganographic schemes based on domain separation.