Steganography Approach Research Articles

Hiding Any Data File Format into Wave Cover

In the current study a steganography approach utilized to hide various data file format in wave files cover. Lest significant bit insertion (LSB) used to embedding a regular computer files (such as graphic, execution file (exe), sound, text, hyper text markup language (HTML) …etc) in a wave file with 2-bits hiding rates. The test results achieved good performance to hide any data file in wave file.

Adaptive Steganography using 3D Color Texture Feature

Human vision framework is commonly an emotional recognition which differs according to people. Intricacy of a picture assumes huge job while verifying information in to it. In this paper another steganography approach is introduced which uses joined 3D Color Texture Feature (CTF) to distinguish complex districts of picture for information stowing away so visual assault to identify shrouded message turns out to be very testing. Recurrence area is utilized to shroud the information in these chose complex areas by means of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). These sorts of zones are initially boisterous and separating additional data is difficult. Each picture has diverse multifaceted nature levels and spatial districts, and since information covering up is legitimately reliant on it, so the steganography framework ends up versatile. The outcome demonstrates that proposed versatile strategy gives secure message stowing away while keeping up subtlety quality and high implanting limit. Last spread pictures keeps up PSNR estimation of over 50. Inserting limit is around multiple times higher in contrast with comparative calculation which uses Gray Level Co-event Matrices (GLCM) highlight to recognize complex districts of pictures for information covering up.

A New Approach of Steganography Using Center Sequential Technique

The quality of steganographic images can be determined from several aspects. One of the testing techniques on steganography is cropping which is part of robustness testing. Under cropping process, it is possible that the secret message cannot be extracted from the stego-image. This happen because the pixels values on the stego-image embedded message changed and the message content on the stego-image will be lost. In this research we propose a new approach for solving that problem by using the algorithm based on Sequential Technique where the input process starts from the center of the cover. The secret information in the form of image and the cover image is also an image. By using this method, the secret image is safe although the cropping is done from left, right, above or bottom of the stego image.

Substitution-based linguistic steganography based on antonyms

<span>The study of steganography focuses on strengthening the security in protecting content message by hiding the true intention behind the texts. However, </span><span>existing linguistic steganography approach especially in synonym-based substitution is prone to attack. In this paper, a new substitution-based approach for linguistic steganography is proposed using antonyms. The antonym-based stego-text generation algorithm is implemented in a tool called the Antonym Substitution-based (ASb). Evaluation of ASb was carried out via verification and validation. The results showed highly favorable performance of this approach.</span>

A Multiple-Chaotic Approach for Steganography

In a recent work, chaos has been utilized to modify addresses of message bits while hidden in a cover image. In this study, we extend the above technique to include multiple chaotic maps for increased security. Three systems have been modified using chaotic-address mapping for image steganography in the spatial domain. The first system, the well-known LSB technique, is based on the selection of pixels and then hides secret message in the Least Significant Bits LSBs of the given pixel. The second system is based on searching for the identical bits between the secret message and the cover image. The third system is based on the concept of LSB substitution. It employs mapping of secret data bits onto the cover pixel bits. To increase the security performance of the above chaos-based steganographic techniques, multiple-chaotic maps are introduced in this study by using multiple formulas to generate chaotic sequences used to track the addresses of shuffled bits. The generated chaotic sequences were evaluated to determine the randomness (using correlation tests) and the chaotic characteristics of a nonlinear system (using Lyapunov exponent, Poincare section and 0-1 test). The performance and security levels of the proposed techniques were evaluated by using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), histogram analysis and correlative analysis. The results show that the proposed method performs existing systems.

A Steganographic Approach to Sonar Tracking

Steganographic transmission waveforms are desirable for many applications, such as underwater acoustic communications, surveillance, detection, and tracking. In the context of active sonar tracking, an overall approach is presented that covers several topics including background sound modeling, steganographic security assessment of transmission waveforms, target motion modeling, and batch track detection. In shallow water, environment background sound dominated by snapping shrimp, the presented approach shows feasibility of steganographic sonar for target track detection. A background sound modeling approach is presented that utilizes symbolic time-series analysis with phase space representation and clustering of time-series segments. The time-evolving characteristics are captured with a hidden Markov model. Steganographic security of the transmission waveform can be assessed by measuring the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the cover model and the stego model. Conventional tracking approaches fail to perform reliably and existing track-before-detect approaches also fail due to overwhelming search computation when they use simplistic short timescale motion models. A long timescale target motion model with considerations for plausibility is presented and utilized in a batch track detection approach. A Monte-Carlo-based simulation is performed to find the scenarios that demonstrate the feasibility of steganographic sonar in a shallow water environment with snapping shrimp sound.

A New Digital Image Steganography Approach Based on The Galois Field GF(pm) Using Graph and Auto

A New Digital Image Steganography Approach Based on The Galois Field GF(pm) Using Graph and Auto

A robust steganographic technique based on improved chaotic-range systems

This paper presents a novel chaos-based technique of steganography in spatial domain. In the last decade, chaos theory has gained utmost importance in multimedia security applications. Generally, 1-D chaotic maps are employed because of computational ease and structural simplicity but their limited chaotic range is an obstacle. In the proposed work, we model the nonlinear combinations of 1-D chaotic maps. These chaotic systems possess chaotic behavior throughout the domain. We, for the first time, propose an effective application of these improved chaotic systems in steganography. These newly synthesized systems are used to embed secret information in the least significant bits (LSBs) of the host image. By comparing with some recent models, we prove that involving improved chaotic systems in steganographic approach really produces extraordinary outcomes. We determine the strength of our steganographic algorithm through the most significant statistical analyses such as information entropy, correlation, contrast, energy, homogeneity, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and mean square error (MSE). We further prove the robustness of the anticipated technique against several image processing attacks. The upshot of these analysis techniques shows that our algorithm is highly reliable and produces coherent results.

An Efficient Image Steganography Approach over Wireless Communication System

This paper presents a robust color image steganography approach for image communication over wireless communication systems. The objective of this approach is to hide three color images in one color cover image to increase the capacity of hiding as most previously published steganography approaches suffer from a capacity problem. Moreover, the investigation of wireless communication of steganography images is presented in this paper to study the sensitivity of extraction of hidden images to the channel degradation effects, which is not studied appropriately in the literature. The proposed approach depends on the Discrete Cosine and Discrete Wavelet transform. The cover image is first transformed to luminance and chrominance components for embedding the images to be hidden. The secret images are encrypted by chaotic Baker map, which is a good representative of the family of permutation-based algorithms, which tolerate the channel degradations better. The investigated wireless communication system is the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing system with channel equalization. The simulation results reveal the success of the proposed work for robust image communication.

An Image Style Transfer Network Using Multilevel Noise Encoding and Its Application in Coverless Steganography

Most of the existing image steganographic approaches embed the secret information imperceptibly into a cover image by slightly modifying its content. However, the modification traces will cause some distortion in the stego-image, especially when embedding color image data that usually contain thousands of bits, which makes successful steganalysis possible. A coverless steganographic approach without any modification for transmitting secret color image is proposed. We propose a diversity image style transfer network using multilevel noise encoding. The network consists of a generator and a loss network. A multilevel noise to encode matching the subsequent convolutional neural network scale is used in the generator. The diversity loss is increased in the loss network so that the network can generate diverse image style transfer results. Residual learning is introduced so that the training speed of network is significantly improved. Experiments show that the network can generate stable results with uniform texture distribution in a short period of time. These image style transfer results can be integrated into our coverless steganography scheme. The performance of our steganography scheme is good in steganographic capacity, anti-steganalysis, security, and robustness.

Design and implementation of secure ATM system using machine learning and crypto–stego methodology

The crucial prerequisite in these days is to get rid of various forms of attacks. Nowadays, for financial transaction, automated teller machines (ATMs) are the mostly used gadgets in which personal identification numbers (PINs) are generally used for transaction. But personal identification numbers (PINs) are not secured from many types of threats (spoofing, eavesdropping, man-in-the middle attack etc.), which can affect the security of the confidential and private information. Due to this reason, different biometric systems gain popularity worldwide for their behavioral and physiological features. However, the current biometric systems, for example, iris, palm, faces fingerprints or voice are extremely complex to use and have different disadvantages. In order to overcome these disadvantages a new concept has been introduced in this paper, for authentication in ATM a finger vein authentication method and for information (finger vein image) transfer a combined approach of steganography and cryptography scheme is used. Finger vein authentication system is implemented by the combination of machine learning and image processing procedure. For the purpose of information (finger vein image) transfer, a combined approach of light-weight cryptography and steganography (variable MSB–LSB algorithm) has been proposed. For finger-vein authentication system, the experiment shows that in proposed classification procedure (one-versus-one and one-versus-all) the average recognition accuracy is 98.75% and 97.92% and the execution time is 0.168 s and 0.187 s respectively. For transferring finger vein image, light-weight cryptography and variable MSB–LSB algorithm are proposed, because light weight cryptography is superior to traditional cryptography in terms of time consumption and variable MSB–LSB algorithm is superior to simple LSB in different aspects such as randomness, security and amount of space consumed.

A Secure Message Passing Method using Multi-Layer Adaptive Video Steganography

Steganography is covert communication of a secret message hidden in a medium passed between the intended sender and receiver with no evidence that the work contains a hidden message. The paper proposes a heuristic approach in steganography to secretly embed message in the cover and make use of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method to be passed on to a secure channel and to be extracted without being detected. Hence the proposed system is a hybrid crypto stego scehme. The study proposes a new and adaptive steganography method that provides multiple layer of security and adaptiveness in passing secret data which emphasizes on undetectability.

Region Secure and Pattern Based Alternate 2B-3C Steganography Approach for Data Security in Color Images

Background and Objective: The public and group communication carried out in the social, cloud, and mobile networks suffer from unauthorized users. The data security is required for secure authentication, monetary transactions and other sensitive information. The steganography methods empower the user with invulnerable communication in public domain. In this paper, a region secure and pattern based alternate 2B-3C (2Bit-3Channel) Steganography method is proposed to improve the content reliability and data security. Methods: In this method, the cover pixels are retrieved by applying the spiral rectangular pattern over the cover image. This spiral pattern also secures the core content region and the pixels from the core ROI (Region of Interest) is used as a cover only for larger size secret information. In this proposed steganography method, two channels are considered alternatively based on the defined rules. The LSB (Least Significant Bit) of both channels is XOR with input data bits and key to perform data hiding. The method is applied on real time color images taken from COREL and USC-SIPI-ID. The evaluation of proposed steganography approach is done using MSE (Mean Square Error), PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio), BER (Bit Error Rate), NCC (Normalized Cross Correlation) and SSIM (Structural Similarity Index Matrix). Result: The comparative results are generated for 50 real time images against the existing LSB (Least Significant Bit), LSBM (Least Significant Bit Modulation), LSBMR (Least Significant bit Matched Revisited), SCC (Stego Color Cycle), SHSI (Simple Hue-Saturation-Intensity), HIS-MLSB(Simple Hue-Saturation-Intensity-Modified LSB) and IMMEA(Iterative Magic Matrix Encryption Algorithm) methods. Conclusion: The experimentation results verified that the proposed 2B-3C approach improved the data hiding in qualitative and quantitative aspects.

High fidelity based reversible data hiding using modified LSB matching and pixel difference

Owing to the inefficiency to hide large volume of secret data for the reversible data hiding (RDH) image steganography approaches, we propose two improved RDH based approaches, such as (1) improved dual image based least significant bit (LSB) matching with reversibility, and (2) n-rightmost bit replacement (n-RBR) and modified pixel value differencing (MPVD). The first approach extends the ability of LSB matching with reversibility using dual images. Whereas the second approach utilizes four identical cover images for secret data embedding using two phases, such as (1) n-rightmost bit replacement (n-RBR) and (2) modified pixel value differencing (MPVD). In the n-RBR phase, n bits of secret data are embedded in the pair of two neighboring pixels of the first two identical images, where 1 ≤ n ≤ 4. Correspondingly, the MPVD phase uses the third and fourth identical images for hiding the secret data. Experimental results with respect to peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), embedding capacity (EC), structural similarity index (SSIM), and the comparative analysis with recently proposed state-of-art approaches exhibit the superiority of the proposed approach. Besides reversibility, the proposed approach ensures high fidelity to salt and pepper (S&P) noise, RS analysis, and pixel difference histogram (PDH) analysis.

Text Steganography Approaches Using Similarity of English Font Styles

Data protection has become a more critical issue and the necessity to secure a transmission channel is become more serious. Therefore, steganography, the art of hidden data into a digital media in a way that embed a secret message in the cover document without permitting anyone to suspect the data existence except the intended recipient, has become a relevant topic of research. The actual challenge in steganography is how it could obtain high robustness and capacity without damaging the cover document imperceptibility. This article presents two steganography approaches that based on the Similarity of English Font Styles (SEFS). This process has the main document font style replaced by a similar font style to embed the secret message after encoding it. This is done by using 1) the upper-case letters and punctuation marks of the carrier document or 2) the white space between words, start and end letters of each word that has more than 2 letters in the carrier document. These approaches are tested by being applied to various document formats with various font styles. From the findings, the secret message was vague to an antagonist and the stego-document size was increased and the capacity is very high. Also, the approaches are implemented using C# to develop a tool that hides a critical data in text document and the same findings were achieved.

Hiding Secret Data Using Image Steganography

Today’s large demand of internet applications requires data to be transmitted in a secure manner. Data transmission in public communication system is not secure because of interception and improper manipulation by eavesdropper. So, the attractive solution for this problem is Steganography, which is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intend recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. Hiding Secret Data Using Image Steganography is the scheme of hiding the existence of secret information by concealing it into another medium such as image file. In this paper we mainly discuss different types of image steganographic methods, advantages and disadvantages. We focus in this paper on Hiding Secret Data Using Image Steganography, which has emerged as a prominent source of data hiding across novel telecommunication technologies such as covered voice-over-IP, audio conferencing, etc. The multitude of steganographic criteria has led to a great diversity in these system design techniques. In this paper, we review current digital image steganographic techniques and we evaluate their performance based on robustness, security and hiding capacity indicators. The primary goal of steganography is to reliably send hidden information secretly, not merely to obscure its presence. Steganography in today’s computer era is considered a sub-discipline of data communication security domain. Lately, new directions based on steganographic approaches started to emerge to ensure data secrecy. Rather than as a substitute to existing solutions, these approaches could achieve better data secrecy if combined with conventional security techniques. Modern techniques of steganography exploit the characteristics of digital media by utilizing them as carriers (covers) to hold hidden information.

Hybrid Robust Image Steganography approach for the secure transmission of biomedical images in Cloud

INTRODUCTION: A rich patient may reside in their home and may prefer to take treatment with all the medical appliances inside the premise. A patient may take treatment in the less specialized hospital, which may be taking a suggestion from a specialist working in a specialized center. In such a scenario, bio-medical images need to be transmitted over the public network. Bio-medical images sent in plain form suffer from confidentiality and integrity problem.OBJECTIVES: To overcome the above problem, medical records are always hidden in the cover image so that others do not know what is being sent.METHODS: In our proposed scheme, the chosen cover image gets divided into the following three planes, namely: R plane, G plane, and B plane. The co-occurrence matrix is computed for each plane by dividing it into 16 x 16 pixels block and then the embedding map is generated from it. The biomedical image is also divided into 8 x 8 pixels block and is hidden into the chosen cover image block using the embedding map. Both cover image blocks and secret image blocks are transformed by RIWT. R matrix of QR decomposition of the cover image and secret image blocks are used in embedding At the end of the embedding phase. These three planes are merged into an RGB image to produce a stego image.RESULTS: To assess the performance of our scheme, parameters like imperceptibility, robustness, and security are considered. With respect to imperceptibility, PSNR values of the stego images are over 50. With respect to robustness, average NCC values between the original secret and the attacked secret is 0.94. With respect to security, stego image cannot be detected easily if it has any secret.CONCLUSION: From the experimental results, our scheme is proved to be better with respect to these three selected parameters.

An Automated Security Approach of Video Steganography–Based LSB Using FPGA Implementation

Steganography has become one of the most significant techniques to conceal secret data in media files. This paper proposes a novel automated methodology of achieving two levels of security for videos, which comprise encryption and steganography techniques. The methodology enhances the security level of secret data without affecting the accuracy and capacity of the videos. In the first level, the secret data is encrypted based on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm using Java language, which renders the data unreadable. In the second level, the encrypted data is concealed in the video frames (images) using FPGA hardware implementation that renders the data invisible. The steganographic technique used in this work is the least significant bit (LSB) method; a 1–1–0 LSB scheme is used to maintain significantly high frame imperceptibility. The video frames used as cover files are selected randomly by the randomization scheme developed in this work. The randomization method scatters the data throughout the video frames rendering the retrieval of the data in its original order, without a proper key, a challenging task. The experimental results of concealment of secret data in video frames are presented in this paper and compared with those of similar approaches. The performance in terms of area, power dissipation, and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of the proposed method outperformed traditional approaches. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the proposed method is capable of automatically embedding and extracting the secret data at two levels of security on video frames, with a 57.1[Formula: see text]dB average PSNR.

A novel approach for audio steganography by processing of amplitudes and signs of secret audio separately

Now a days, cases of theft of important data both by employees of the organization and outside hackers are increasing day-by-day. So, new methods for information hiding and secret communication are need of today. Steganography is an option for it. Embedding a secret message into other meaningful message (cover media) without disturbing the features of the cover media is known as steganography. A novel approach for audio steganography is proposed in this paper. Here, secret message and cover media both are digital audio. Proposed approach is robust with respect to both LSB removal and re-sampling attacks. This approach adds extra layer of security because a transformation function is applied on amplitude bits of secret audio before embedding. This approach is more resistive towards white Gaussian noise addition (WGN) during transmission of stego file. The proposed approach is also suitable for embedding secret audio during real time audio communication because processing time is low while embedding capacity is high. Embedding capacity of the proposed approach is same as of conventional LSB approach because in both approaches one bit of secret is being inserted in each sample of cover audio. Standard parameters: Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) are used for measuring the imperceptibility between cover audio & stego audio. For the proposed approach, PESQ and MOS are found as 4.47 and 5 that are very close to their respective highest values 4.5 and 5 when there is no attack.

An Optimal Information Hiding Approach Based on Pixel Value Differencing and Modulus Function

This paper proposes an image steganography approach based on pixel value differencing and modulus function (PVDMF) to improve the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and hiding capacity (HC). The proposed approach has two variants, (1) PVDMF 1 and (2) PVDMF 2. Both the variants use the difference between a pair of consecutive pixels to embed the secret data based on an adaptive range table. The modulus operations with pixel readjustment have been utilized to reduce the distortion in the stego-image. The experimental results prove that the PVDMF 1 offer higher PSNR and PVDMF 2 offers larger HC as compared to the existing approaches. In addition, the fall off boundary problem which exists in most of the pixel value differencing approaches has been avoided. Furthermore, it has been experimentally verified that the proposed approach is resistant against RS attack.