VRL an eye

Steganalysis: Detection of Hidden Data

People

Anindya Sarkar, Ken Sullivan, Zhiqiang Bi, U. Madhow, B.S.Manjunath, S. Chandrasekaran

Objective

The widespread use of steganography inevitably leads to a need to detect hidden data. Steganalysis is detecting and ultimately extracting data hidden in an innocuous medium. Our goal is to establish a solid framework for steganalysis, and design systems to detect state-of-the-art hiding systems. Additionally, we aim to use lessons learned in detecting to create hiding systems that can evade detection.

Approach

To the extent that an image can be modeled as a statistical process, detection-theory provides a well-established means for analyzing the degree to which steganography can be detected. In practice, statistics assumed to be known for theoretical analysis is not known. For data hiding methods that are theoretically detectable, we seek to find practical means to do so. In some cases we can estimate the unknown statistics from a questionable image, in other cases we employ supervised learning techniques to overcome the practical difficulties.

Examples

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by a grant from ONR # N00014-01-1-0380. Program manager: Dr. Ralph Wachter

Publications

    2008

  1. Anindya Sarkar, Kaushal Solanki and B. S. Manjunath,
    "Further Study on YASS: Steganography Based on Randomized Embedding to Resist Blind Steganalysis"
    Proc. SPIE - Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents (X), San Jose, California, Jan. 2008.
    [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "We present further extensions of yet another steganographic scheme (YASS), a method based on embedding data in randomized locations so as to resist blind steganalysis. YASS is a JPEG steganographic te..." [more]

  2. A. Sarkar, K. Sullivan and B. S. Manjunath,
    "Steganographic Capacity Estimation for the Statistical Restoration Framework"
    Proc. SPIE - Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents (X), San Jose, California, Jan. 2008.
    [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "In this paper we attempt to quantify the "active" steganographic capacity - the maximum rate at which data can be hidden, and correctly decoded, in a multimedia cover subject to noise/attack (hence - ..." [more]

    3. 2007

  3. A. Sarkar and B. S. Manjunath,
    "Estimating Steganographic Capacity for Odd-Even Based Embedding and its Use in Individual Compensation"
    Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), San Antonio, TX, Sep. 2007.
    [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "We present a method to compute the steganographic capacity for images, with odd-even based hiding in the quantized discrete cosine transform domain. The method has been generalized for varying orders ..." [more]

  4. Kaushal Solanki, Anindya Sarkar and B. S. Manjunath,
    "YASS: Yet Another Steganographic Scheme that Resists Blind Steganalysis"
    9th International Workshop on Information Hiding, Saint Malo, Brittany, France, Jun. 2007.
    [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "A new, simple, approach for active steganography is pro- posed in this paper that can successfully resist recent blind steganaly- sis methods, in addition to surviving distortion constrained attacks. ..." [more]

  5. A. Sarkar, K. Solanki, U. Madhow, S. Chandrasekaran and B. S. Manjunath,
    "Secure Steganography: Statistical Restoration of the Second Order Dependencies for Improved Security"
    Proc. 32nd IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Honolulu, Hawaii, Apr. 2007.
    [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "We present practical approaches for steganography that can provide improved security by closely matching the second-order statistics of the host rather than just the marginal distribution. The methods..." [more]

    6. 2006

  6. K. Sullivan, K. Solanki, B.S. Manjunath, U. Madhow and S. Chandrasekaran,
    "Determining achievable rates for secure zero divergence steganography"
    Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2006 (ICIP06), Atlanta, GA USA, Oct. 2006.
    [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "In steganography (the hiding of data into innocuous covers for secret communication) it is difficult to estimate how much data can be hidden while still remaining undetectable. To measure the inherent..." [more]

  7. K. Solanki, K. Sullivan, U. Madhow, B. S. Manjunath and S. Chandrasekaran,
    "Provably secure steganography: Achieving zero K-L divergence using statistical restoration"
    Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2006 (ICIP06), Atlanta, GA USA, Oct. 2006.
    [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "In this paper, we present a framework for the design of steganographic schemes that can provide provable security by achieving zero Kullback-Leibler divergence between the cover and the stego signal d..." [more]

  8. K. Sullivan, U. Madhow, S. Chandrasekaran and B.S. Manjunath,
    "Steganalysis for Markov cover data with applications to images"
    IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 275-287, Jun. 2006.
    VRL ID: 157, [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "The difficult task of steganalysis, or the detection of the presence of hidden data, can be greatly aided by exploiting the correlations inherent in typical host or cover signals. In particular, sever..." [more]

    9. 2005

  9. K. Solanki, K. Sullivan, U. Madhow, B. S. Manjunath and S. Chandrasekaran,
    "Statistical Restoration for Robust and Secure Steganography"
    Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Genova, Italy, Sep. 2005.
    VRL ID: 149, [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "We investigate data hiding techniques that attempt to defeat steganalysis by restoring the statistics of the composite image to resemble that of the cover. The approach is to reserve a number of host ..." [more]

  10. K. Sullivan, U. Madhow, S. Chandrasekaran and B. S. Manjunath,
    "Steganalysis of spread spectrum data hiding exploiting cover memory"
    Proc. IS&T/SPIE's 17th Annual Symposium on Electronic Imaging Science and Technology, San Jose, CA, Jan. 2005.
    VRL ID: 142, [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "In this paper we study steganalysis, the detection of hidden data. Specifically we focus on detecting data hidden in grayscale images with spread spectrum hiding. To accomplish this we use a statistic..." [more]

    11. 2004

  11. O. Dabeer, K. Sullivan, U. Madhow, S. Chandrasekaran and B.S. Manjunath,
    "Detection of Hiding in the Least Significant Bit"
    IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Supplement on Secure Media I, vol. 52, no. 10, pp. 3046-3058, Oct. 2004.
    VRL ID: 136, [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "In this paper, we apply the theory of hypothesis testing to the steganalysis, or detection of hidden data, in the least significant bit (LSB) of a host image. The hiding rate (if data is hidden) and h..." [more]

  12. K. Sullivan, Z. Bi, U. Madhow, S. Chandrasekaran and B.S. Manjunath,
    "Steganalysis of quantization index modulation data hiding"
    Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Singapore, pp. 1165-1168, Oct. 2004.
    VRL ID: 140, [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "Quantization index modulation (QIM) techniques have been gaining popularity in the data hiding community because of their robustness and information-theoretic optimality against a large class of attac..." [more]

    13. 2003

  13. K. Sullivan, O. Dabeer, U. Madow, B. S. Manujunath and S. Chandrasekaran,
    "LLRT Based Detection of LSB Hiding"
    IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Barcelona, Spain, vol. 1, pp. 497-500, Sep. 2003.
    VRL ID: 120, [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "In this paper we consider a hypothesis testing approach for detection of hiding in the least significant bit (LSB). This steganalysis problem is a composite hypothesis test-ing problem. We state a reg..." [more]

  14. O. Dabeer, K. Sullivan, U. Madow, S. Chandrasekaran and B. S. Manjunath,
    "Detection of hiding in the least significant bit"
    Proc. Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, Mar. 2003.
    VRL ID: 113, [abstract] [PDF] [BibTex]

    Abstract preview: "We consider the problem of detecting hiding in the least significant bit (LSB) of images. Since the hiding rate is not known, this is a composite hypothesis testing problem. We show that under a mild ..." [more]