Department Of Computer Science & Engineering

A SEMINAR REPORT ON An Improved Method for Steganography on Mobile Phone

2011-2012

Submitted By: To: Roopam Bairagi Kumar

Submitted Mr. Roopesh

0702cs091073 Tomar CSE.

Mr. Vikram Singh Lect. Dept.Of

MANDSAUR INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY,MANDSAUR (M.P.)

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that seminar report on An Improved Method for Steganography on Mobile Phone Has been carried out successfully by Miss Roopam Bairagi Enrollment No.0702cs091073 OF Third Year B.E. Computer Science & Engineering during the academic year 2011-2012

Seminar Guide H.O.D.(CSE)

MANDSAUR INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, MANDSAUR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The completion of any inter disciplinary seminar report depends upon cooperation, coordination combined effects of several resources of knowledge, energy and time. Special thanks are owned to Mr. Roopesh Kumar & Mr. Vikram Singh Tomar for giving me inspiration and instructing me with a job of great responsibility. I am greatly indebted to them for giving me the opportunity to show my credence. He incessantly remained the source of courage and inspiration for me. I would also like to express our deepest sense of gratitude to our parents who always helped and supported us with their good wishes and blessing. Lastly, we are greatly indebted to all those individuals who have made innumerable contribution to the completion of this Seminar Report.

Student Name Roopam Bairagi

Table of Contents
Sr.No. Page No Topic

1.

Introduction
Introduction to Terms used History of Steganography

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Coding Algorithm Image Compression Image encoding Techniques Steganalysis Steganography Tools Advantage and Disadvantage Conclusion

Introduction
Steganography comes from the Greek and literally means, Covered or secret writing". Although related to cryptography, they are not the same. Steganographys intent is to hide the e x i s t e n c e o f t h e m e s s a g e , while cryptography scrambles a message so that it cannot b e understood. Steganography is one of various data hiding techniques, which aims at transmitting a message on a channel where some other kind of information is already being transmitted .This distinguishes Steganography from covert channel techniques, which instead of trying to transmit data between two entities that were unconnected before. The goal

of Steganography is to hide messages inside other harmless messages in a way that does not allow any enemy to even detect that there is a second secret message present. The only missing information for the enemy is the short easily exchange able random number sequence, the secret key, without the secret key, the enemy should not have the slightest chance of even becoming suspicious that on an observed communication channel, hidden communication might take place. The development of digital devices, introduces a rapid growth in the wireless communication systems. One of the areas of communication in which the growth is significant includes the mobile phone industry. A mobile phone is not only a phone but also a small and portable computer. It can connect to the internet, produce or show digital images, generate and play movies and music. It can be used as electronic cash or a game playing system, etc.People, especially young people, like mobile phones very much. On the rapid use of these systems, the security is a big issue. Many hackers try to attack mobile phones. The extensive use of these systems increases the possibility of the intrusion. Therefore the security of the information transferred into these devices becomes a major issue for users and developers. A new approach for protecting the information is to use steganography. In this paper I introduce an improved method for hiding data into image for mobile phones. Because sending and receiving images are common on the mobile phones, the hackers are not attracted to attack the system. Other advantages of this method are its simplicity and wide range of application. I used this method for announcing students' grades via internet to mobile phones.

Introduction to Terms used:

In the field of steganography, some terminology has developed .The adjectives Cover Embedded And stego were defined at the Information Hiding W o r k s h o p h e l d i n C a m b r i d g e , E n g l a n d . T h e t e r m ` ` c o v e r ' ' i s u s e d t o d e s c r i b e t h e o r i g i n a l Steganography 2010 i n n o c e n t m e s s a g e , d a t a , a u d i o , s t i l l , v i d e o a n d s o o n . W h e n r e f e r r i n g t o a u d i o s i g n a l Steganography, the cover signal is sometimes called the ``host'' signal .The information to be hidden in the cover data is known as the embedded'' data. The ``stego'' data is the data containing both the cover signal and the ``embedded'' information .L o g i c a l l y , t h e p r o c e s s i n g o f p u t t i n g the hidden or embedded as data, into the cover data, I sometimes known embedding. Occasionally, formula

e s p e c i a l l y w h e n r e f e r r i n g t o i m a g e Steganography, the cover image is known as the container .T h e t h e steganographic process : cover medium + hidden data + stego_key = stego_medium1.3 History of Steganography: Through out history Steganography has been used to secretly communicate information between people .Some examples of use following provides a very generic description of the pieces of

of

steganography

in

past

time

are: Dept.ofE&C

cover medium + hidden data + stego_key = stego_medium

History of Steganography:
Through out history Steganography has been used to secretly communicate information between people. Some examples of use of Steganography in past times are:

Steganography 2010
During World War 2 invisible ink was used to write information on pieces of paper so that the paper appeared to the average person as just being blank pieces of paper. Liquids such as urine, milk, vinegar and fruit juices were used, because when each one of these substances are heated they darken and become visible to the human eye. In Ancient Greece they used to select messengers and shave their head, they would then write a message on their head. Once the message had been written the hair was allowed to grow back. After the hair grew back the messenger was sent to deliver the message, the recipient would shave have off the messengers hair to see the secret message. Another method used in Greece was where someone would peel wax off a tablet that was covered in wax, write a message underneath the wax then re-apply the wax. The recipient of the message would simply remove the wax from the tablet to view the message.

The Coding Algorithm

In the usual steganography algorithms, information is hidden in the sequential pixels. Therefore anyone with the knowledge of the coding algorithm can extract the hidden information from the image. In this paper I used a new approach for selecting pixels according to a password. Using the password would cause to select the pixels in a random manner. In the usual steganography algorithms, if the size of the information is small in comparison with the size of image, the attacker can find the pattern of altered pixels and extract the hidden information. But in this method, information is in random order pixels in each block, and extracting the hidden information is difficult. On the other hand if the size of the information is large, the algorithm reaches the end of image. For solving this problem, it has to return to the beginning of the image and hide

information in an empty pixel (an empty pixel is defined as a pixel of original image that has no hidden data). This process needs a large amount of memory to remember all empty pixels, but in the mobile phones we have a limited amount of memory. After all, finding an empty pixel needs a lot of time in coding or decoding phases. The new method for hiding information is described here: In this method the image is segmented into n blocks of m pixels. Then according to the password, a block is selected and the information is hidden in an empty pixel of this block. The algorithm for selecting a block and an empty pixel in that block is as follows: if the selected block starts with the pixel number k and has m pixels then the number of the last pixel is k+m-1. This algorithm uses an array of size m+1 for remembering empty pixels of current block. This array contains the number of pixels having no data. The last cell of the array is the total empty pixels in the current block. According to the password, an empty pixel is selected and the last empty pixel number is copied to this array cell. After this operation the total number of empty pixels on the block decreases by one. This method is also used for selecting a block to hide the information in itself. The figure-1 shows the array before and after selecting a pixel. k k+1 k+2 k+i-1 k+m-2 k+m-1 m 1 2 3 i ... (a) The array before selecting an empty pixel. k k+1 k+2 k+m-1 k+m-2 null m-1 1 2 3 i ... (b) The array after selecting an empty pixel. Selecting the next empty pixels The advantage of this method is that there is no need to search for an empty pixel in the block, because we have the

empty pixel numbers of the current block in an array. On the other hand by dividing the image into small blocks, it only needs a small amount of memory. We indicate that the size of memory is a critical factor among mobile phones applications.If the image is very large, it can be stored on the hard drive and only one of its blocks is transferred to the memory and after hiding the information on that block, it is stored back on the hard drive .This method swaps the last cell of the array with the ith cell of the array. The advantage of this work is that the pixels are filled in a random order and can not decode without knowing the password .This method for hiding information in images can be used for secure communication, copyright protection, preventing undesirable changes in digital documents, protecting from unauthorized copying and other applications. Some Guidelines to Image Steganography: Before proceeding further, some explanation of image files is necessary. To a computer ,an image is an array of numbers that represent light intensities at various points, or pixels. These pixels make up the image's raster data. An image size of 640 by 480 pixels, utilizing 256 colors(8 bits per pixel) is fairly common. Such an image would contain around 300 kilobits of data .Digital images are typically stored in either 24-bit or 8-bit per pixel files. 24-bit images a are sometimes image known provides as true color images. for hiding Obviously, 24-bit more space

information; however, 24-bit images are generally large and not that common. A 24-bitimage 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high would have a size in excess of 2 megabytes. As such large files would attract attention were they to be transmitted across a network or the Internet ,image compression is desirable. However, compression brings with it other problems, as will explain shortly.

Image Compression:

Image

compression

offers a

solution

to large

image

f i l e s . T w o k i n d s o f i m a g e compression are lossless and lossy compression. Both methods save storage space but have differing effects on any uncompressed hidden data in the image .Lossy compression, as typified by JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format files, offers high compression, but may not maintain the original image's integrity. This can impact negatively on any hidden data in the image. This is due to the lossy compression algorithm ,which may ``lose'' unnecessary image data, providing a close approximation to high-quality d i g i t a l i m a g e s , b u t n o t a n e x a c t d u p l i c a t e . H e n c e , t h e t e r m ` ` l o s s y ' ' c o m p r e s s i o n . L o s s y compression is frequently used on true-color images, as it offers high compression rates Steganography 2010 Lossless compression maintains the original image data exactly; hence it is preferred when the original information must remain intact. It is thus more favored by steganographic techniques. Unfortunately, lossless compression does not offer such high compression rates as lossy compression. Typical examples of lossless compression formats are CompuServes GIF(Graphics Interchange Format) and Microsoft's BMP (Bitmap) format.

Image Encoding Techniques:

Information can be hidden many different ways in images. Straight message insertion can b e d o n e , w h i c h w i l l s i m p l y e n c o d e e v e r y b i t o f i n f o r m a t i o n i n t h e i m a g e . M o r e c o m p l e x encoding can be done to embed the message only in ``noisy'' areas of the image, that will attract less attention. The message may also be scattered randomly throughout the cover image .The most common approaches to information hiding in images are:

Least significant bit (LSB) insertion Masking and filtering techniques Algorithms and transformations Each of these can be applied to various images, with varying degrees of success. Each of them suffers to varying degrees from operations performed on images, such as cropping, or resolution decrementing, or decreases in the color depth.

Least Significant bit insertion:

The least significant bit insertion method is probably the most well known image steganography technique. It is a common, simple approach to embedding information in a graphical image file. Unfortunately, it is extremely vulnerable to attacks, such as image manipulation. A simple conversion from a GIF or BMP format to a lossy compression form at Such as JPEG can destroy the hidden information in the image When applying LSB techniques to each byte of a 24-bit image, three bits can be encoded into each pixel. (As each pixel is represented by three bytes) Any changes in the pixel bits will b e i n d i s c e r n i b l e to the human eye. For example, the letter A can be hidden i n t h r e e p i x e l s . Assume the original three pixels are represented by the three 24-bit words below:(00100111 11101001 11001000)(00100111 1100100101001)(11001000 00100111 11101001)The binary value for the letter A is (101101101). Inserting the binary value of A into the three pixels, starting from the top left byte, would result in: (00100111 1110100 0 1100100 1

)(00100111 11001000 11101001)(1100100 1 0010011 0 11101001)The emphasized bits are the only bits that actually changed. The main advantage of LSB Insertion is that data can be hidden in the least and second to least bits and still the human eye would be unable to notice it .W h e n u s i n g L S B t e c h n i q u e s o n 8 - b i t i m a g e s , m o r e c a r e n e e d s t o b e t a k e n , a s 8 - b i t formats are not as forgiving to data changes as 24-bit formats are. Care needs to be taken in the selection of the cover image, so that changes to the data will not be visible in the stego-image .Commonly known images, (such as famous paintings, like the Mona Lisa) should be avoided. In fact, a simple picture of your dog would be quite sufficient .When modifying the LSB bits in 8-bit images, the pointers to entries in the palette are changed. It is important to remember that a change of even one bit could mean the difference between a shade of red and a shade of blue. Such a change would be immediately noticeable on the displayed image, and is thus a an acceptable. For this reason, data-hiding experts recommend Steganography where the 2010 using grey-scale shades are palettes, differences between

n o t a s p r o n o u n c e d . Alternatively, images consisting mostly of one color, such as the so-called Renoir palette, named because it comes from a 256 color version of Renoir's ``Le Moulin de la Galette''.

Masking and Filtering:

Masking and filtering techniques hide information by marking an image in a manner similar to paper watermarks. Because

watermarking techniques are more integrated into thei m a g e , they may be applied without fear of image destruction from l o s s y c o m p r e s s i o n . B y covering, or masking a faint but perceptible signal with another to make the first non-perceptible, we exploit the fact that the human visual system cannot detect slight changes in certain temporal domains of the image. Technically, watermarking is not a steganographic form. Strictly, steganography conceals data in the image; watermarking extends the image information and becomes an attribute of the cover image, providing license, ownership or copyright details. Masking techniques are more suitable for use in lossy JPEG images than LSB insertion because of their relative immunity to image operations such as compression and cropping.

Algorithms and transformations:

Because they are high quality color images with good compression, it is desirable to use PEG images across networks such as the Internet. Indeed, JPEG images are becoming abundant on the Internet.JPEG images use the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to achieve compression. DCT is a lossy compression transform, because the cosine values cannot be calculated precisely, and Steganography 2010 rounding errors may be introduced. Variances between the original data and the recovered data Depend on the values and methods used to calculate the DCT.I m a g e s Fourier can also be processed wavelet using fast transformation and Transformation.

Other properties such as luminance can also be utilized. The HVS has a very low sensitivity to small changes in luminance, being able to discern changes of no less than one part in thirty for random patterns. This figure goes up to one part in 240 for uniform regions of an image. M o d e r n steganographic systems use spread-spectrum

c o m m u n i c a t i o n s t o t r a n s m i t n arrowband signal over a much larger bandwidth so that the spectral density of the signal in thechannel looks like noise. T h e t w o d i f f e r e n t s p r e a d - s p e c t r u m t e c h n i q u e s t h e s e tools employ are called d i r e c t - sequence and frequency hopping. The former hides information by phase-modulating the data signal (carrier) with a pseudorandom number sequence that both the sender and the receiver know. The latter divides the available bandwidth into multiple channels and hops between these channels (also triggered by a pseudorandom number sequence).T h e Patchwork method is based on a pseudor andom, statistical process t h a t t a k e s advantage of the human weaknesses to luminance variation. Using redundant pattern encoding to repeatedly scatter hidden

information

throughout

the

cover

image,

like

patchwork,

Patchwork can hide a reasonably small message many times in a image. In the Patchwork method, n pairs of i m a g e p o i n t s ( a , b ) a r e r a n d o m l y chosen. The brightness of a is decreased by one and the b r i g h t n e s s o f b i s i n c r e a s e d b y o n e . F o r a l a b e l e d i m a g e , t h e e x p e c t e d v a l u e o f t h e s u m differences of the n pairs of points is then 2n. Bender shows that after JPEG compression, with the quality factor set to 75, the message can still be decoded with an 85.This message size. algorithm such as is more robust are to image for processing such as cropping and rotating, but at the cost of Techniques Patchwork ideal watermarking of images. Even if the image is cropped, there is a good probability that the watermark will still be readable.

Steganalysis
Whereas the goal of steganography is the avoidance of suspicion to hidden messages in other data, steganalysis aims to discover and render useless such covert messages. Hiding information within

electronic media requires alterations of the media properties that may introduce some form of degradation or unusual characteristics. These characteristics may act as signatures that broadcast the existence of the embedded message, thus defeating the purpose of steganography.Attacks and analysis on hidden information may take several forms: detecting, extracting, a n d embed c o u n t e r - information Here two methods over are the looked disabling or destroying hidden information. An attacker may also existing into: hidden detecting information.

messages or their transmission and disabling embedded information. These approaches (attacks)vary depending upon the methods used to embed the information in to the cover media. Some amount of distortion and degradation may occur to carriers of hidden messages even though such distortions cannot be detected easily by the human perceptible system. This Detecting Hidden Information: Unusual patterns stand out and expose the possibility of hidden information. In text, small shifts in word and line spacing may be somewhat difficult to detect by the casual observer. However, appended spaces and "invisible" characters can be easily revealed by opening the file with a common word processor. The text may look "normal" if typed out on the screen, but if the f i l e i s o p e n e d i n a w o r d p r o c e s s o r , t h e spaces, hidden tabs, and other Selecting and carriers characters the is distort the of t e x t ' s presentation. I m a g e s t o o m a y d i s p l a y d i s t o r t i o n s f r o m information. tools r o p e r combination the key to steganography successful

information hiding. Some images may become grossly degraded with even small amounts of embedded information. This visible noise will give away the existence of hidden information. The same is true with audio. Echoes and shadow signals reduce the chance of audible noise, but they can be detected with little processing. Only after evaluating many original images and stego images as to color composition, luminance, and

pixel relationships do anomalies point to characteristics that are not "normal" in other images. Patterns become visible when evaluating many images used for applying steganography.Such patterns are unusual sorting of color palettes, relationships between colors in color indexes, exaggerated "noise" An approach used to identify such patterns is to compare the original cover-images with the stegno-images and note visible differences (known-cover attack).Minute changes are readily noticeable when comparing the cover and stego-images. In making these comparisons Steganography Tools:

MP3Stego
MP3Stego will hide information in MP3 files during the compression process. The data is first compressed, encrypted and then hidden in the MP3 bit stream

JPHide and JPSeek

JPHIDE and JPSEEK are programs which allow you to hide a file in a jpeg visual image. There are lots of versions of similar programs available on the internet but JPHIDE and JPSEEK are rather special.

Blindside Cryptographic Tool

Blindside is an example of the art of Steganography - the passing of secret messages in a f o r m s u c h t h a t o n e w o u l d n o t s u s p e c t t h e message is being passed. This is an area o f Steganography 2010 cryptography that is attracting considerable interest of late. The landside utility can hide a file(or files) of any variety, within a Windows Bitmap image (BMP file).

Security
A method, SBIPM, for providing the security of our important information is based on the techniques of signal processing, cryptography, and steganography. The security of information has been strengthened by applying scanning, coding, encryption, cover processing and embedding techniques in the method. Reshaping step of the method provides robustness for detecting message correctly in such situation when stego image is distorted. The method developed is safe from various attacks. Simulation and steganalysis results shown in this paper shows that one will not be able to distinguish between cover and stego images. Thus we conclude that the strength of security achieved is very high and unauthorized receiver will not be able to get back the original message using exhaustive without the knowledge of key parameters. Digital Steganography is interesting field and growing rapidly for information hiding in the area of information security.lt has a vital role in defence as well as civil applications. In future we will more of secure systems based on this technology. Several methods for hiding data in, images were described, with appropriate introductions to the environments of each medium, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each method. The key algorithm for designing the steganography system has been dealt. Most data-hiding systems take advantage of human perceptual weaknesses, but have weaknesses of their own. We conclude that for now, it seems that no system of datahiding is totally immune to attack. However, steganography has its place in security. Though it cannot replace cryptography totally, it is intended to supplement it. Its application in watermarking and fingerprinting, for use in detection of unauthorized, illegally copied material, is continually being realized and developed.

Future Scope

In this report many relevant issues were presented, from a technical point of view. However, little has been done to motivate these studies. A more detailed investigation of applications, and a comparison with current techniques in steganography would have been interesting. For example, a thorough evaluation of the advantages natural languagebased techniques can offer over image-based techniques could have offered valuable insights. An important contribution of this project to natural language steganography is the linguistic sophistication of the model for wordsubstitution put forward. The lexical models employed in current substitution-based systems were often criticized and their inadequate behavior usually described with respect to language theory. These phenomena could have been demonstrated by example, showing texts and inadequate replacements carried out by current stegosystems. A more detailed analysis of how common these critical situations really are in typical text could have given clues for the construction of such systems, to decide whether the additional complexity introduced by statistical word-sense disambiguation is worth the effort. Other linguistic models have been studied, in addition to the lexical ones, and put in relation to each other, and to their use for steganographic purposes. The steganographic aspects were then covered by information-theoretic models. However, little has been done to justify this choice. It might have been fruitful to present other characterizations of steganography and to compare their suitability to natural language steganography. A central part of the problem motivating this report was that there are no models formalizing the design and analysis of natural language stegosystems. Although the present report somewhat improves the situation, by providing a systematic investigation of the topic, there is still no system to build upon for making formal claims about security or

robustness in the natural language scenario.

Advantages and Disadvantages

The advantages of this method are: 1- The probability that one can detect a stegano image is relatively low, due to the high volume of images exchanged between mobile phones and computers. 2- As far as I am aware, this is the first time that this method is used on a mobile phone 3- The password is not stored in the stegano image; therefore it is difficult to detect the password. 4- Because the password is used, it is difficult to detect the information hidden in the image. 5- The decoding program uses a few kilobytes of memory. 6- The program is fast enough. 7- There is no limitation for selecting the password. The disadvantages of this method are: 1- There is a variety of mobile phones on the market for which there isnt a standard operating system, so it is not possible to produce a coder program for all of them. 2- The stegano image is sensitive to the size and other characteristics of the image; therefore changing the image could destroy the hidden information.

Conclusion
This paper introduces an improved method of hiding information in image for mobile phones. This method allows a secure transfer of information between a computer and a mobile phone. In this implementation students connect to the course web site via internet with their Nokia 6600 mobile phone and get their grades. It can use other kind of wireless communication such as Bluetooth to transfer data between computer and mobile phone. This method can be extended to hide data into video clips and sound clips that are common on new mobile phones.

Bibliography
L. M. Marvel, C.T. Retter and C. G. Boncelet, Hiding Information in Images ] R.J. Anderson, F. A. P. Petitcolas, On the limits of the steganography, www.wseas.us/e-library dl.acm.org www.google.com www.wikipedia.com