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What is steganography?
The art of concealing the existence of information within seemingly innocuous carriers
Hiding information in plain sight
Steganography vs cryptography
Cryptography
Attempts to hide the meaning of the message by scrambling it so that if it is intercepted, it cannot be understood An encrypted message may draw suspicion
Steganography
Attempts to hide the actual existence of the message by camouflaging it By concealing the fact that a message is being sent altogether, no suspicion is raised
shave the head of a messenger tattoo a message or image on the messengers head allow the hair to grow back the message would be undetected until the head was shaved again
Secret compartments
e.g. hide a message inside a nail, then hammer this nail into a piece of wood with many other nails
Retrieval of message
In order to retrieve the secret message, the recipient must know the method used to hide it
E.g. must know:
To scrape off wax To shave head of messenger Which nail contains the message That every 3rd letter must be extracted
Steganography in images
Way images are stored:
Array of numbers representing RGB values for each pixel Common images are in 8-bit/pixel and 24-bit/pixel format. 24-bit images have lot of space for storage but are huge and invite compression 8-bits are good options. Proper selection of cover image is important. Best candidates: gray scale images .. Cashing on limitations of perception in human vision
There are usually two type of files used when embedding data into an image
the innocent looking image which will hold the hidden information is a "container" a "message" is the information to be hidden
may be plain-text, ciphertext, other images, sound, etc. message will be embedded in the least significant bits (LSB) of the container image.
11001000 00100111
11101001 11101001
11101000 11001000 00100111 11001000 11101000 11101001
According to researchers on an average only 50% of the pixels actually change from 0-1 or 1-0.
Sample palettes
TOP SECRET
Example: Copyright Fabian A.P. Petitcolas, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fapp2/steganography/image_downgrading/
Original Image
Extracted Image
Original Image
Extracted Image
Conclusion
Steganography has its place in the security. On its own, it wont serve much but when used as a layer of cryptography, it would lead to a greater security. Far fetched applications in privacy protection and intellectual property rights protection. Research is going on in both the directions One is how to incorporate hidden or visible copyright information in various media, which would be published. At the same time, in opposite direction, researcher are working on how to detect the trafficking of illicit material & covert messages published by certain outlawed groups.
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