Acknowledgement

I would like to express my deep gratitude towards my project guide Dr. Ashish
Khare for his able guidance and supervision which helped me for starting this
project.
I am extremely grateful and remain indebted to him for being a source of
inspiration and for his constant support in the idea and starting of the project.
I am thankful to him for his constant constructive criticism and invaluable
suggestions, which benefited me a lot while starting the project on Image
Steganography
I would also like to thank to Prof R.R.Tewari and Dr. T.J. Siddhiquie who were
directly and indirectly instrument in enabling me to stay committed for the
project.
I am also very much thankful to my parents and other family members for being
such a great source of inspiration of mine.

Ashesh Mishra
M.Sc.IIIrd Sem(2011-12)
Computer Science

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Objective
Subject of steganography, mainly focused on embedding text data in digital
images. The goal of steganography is covert communication. So, a fundamental
requirement of this steganography system is that the hider message carried by
stego-media should not be sensible to human beings.
The other goal of steganography is to avoid drawing suspicion to the existence of
a hidden message. This approach of information hiding technique has recently
become important in a number of application areas.
This project has following objectives:
To product security tool based on steganography techniques.
To explore techniques of hiding data using encryption module of this
project
To extract techniques of getting secret data using decryption module.
Steganography sometimes is used when encryption is not permitted. Or, more
commonly, steganography is used to supplement encryption. An encrypted file
may still hide information using steganography, so even if the encrypted file is
deciphered, the hidden message is not seen.

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Introduction
The word steganography is derived from the Greek words stegos meaning
cover and grafia meaning writing defining it as covered writing.
Steganography refers to the science of invisible" communication. Steganographic
techniques strive to hide the very presence of the message itself from an
observer. The general idea of hiding some information in digital content has a
wider class of applications that go beyond steganography. Steganography is the
process of hiding a secret message within a larger one in such a way that
someone cannot know the presence or contents of the hidden message. Although
related, Steganography is not to be confused with Encryption, which is the
process of making a message unintelligibleSteganography attempts to hide the
existence of communication.
Steganography is the practice of hiding private or sensitive information within
something that appears to be nothing out to the usual.

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History of Steganography
440 B.C.
Herodotus recounts the story of Histaiaeus, who wanted to encourage
Aristagoras of Miletus to revolt against the Persian king. In order to securely
convey his plan. Histiaeus shaved the head of his most trusted slave and tattooed
it with a message which disappeared after the hair had regrown. To instigate a
revolt against Persians. The messenger, apparently carrying nothing contentious,
could travel freely. Arriving at his destination, he shaved his head and pointed it
at the recipient.

1st and 2nd World Wars

German spies used invisible ink to print very small dots on letters.
Microdots Blocks of text or images scaled down to the size of a regular
dot.

Early Sreganography
Pictographs: e.g., Sherlock Holmess Dancing Men.

Come Here At Once

Although steganography is an ancient subject, the modern formulation of it is
often given in terms of the prisoners problem proposed by Simmons, where two
inmates wish to communicate in secret to hatch an escape plan. All of their
communication passes through a warden who will throw them in solitary
confinement should she suspect any covert communication.
The warden, who is free to examine all communication exchanged between the
inmates, can either be passive or active. A passive warden simply examines the
communication to try and determine if it potentially contains secret information.

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If she suspects a communication to contain hidden information, a passive warden

takes note of the detected covert communication, reports this to some outside
party and lets the message through without blocking it. An active warden, on the
other hand, will try to alter the communication with the suspected hidden
information deliberately, in order to remove the information.

Applications
Image Steganography has many applications, especially in todays modern, hightech world. Privacy and anonymity is a concern for most people on the internet.
Image Steganography allows for two parties to communicate secretly and
covertly.
It allows for some morally-conscious people to safely whistle blow on
internal actions.

It allows for copyright protection on digital files using the message as a

digital watermark.
One of the other main uses for Image Steganography is for the
transportation of high-level or top-secret documents between international
governments.
Image Steganography has many legitimate uses; it can also be quite
nefarious. It can be used by hackers to send viruses and Trojans to
compromise machines, and also by terrorists and other organizations that
rely on covert operations to communicate secretly and safely.

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Basic Structure of Steganography

Steganography is the practice of hiding private or sensitive information within
something that appears to be nothing out to the usual.
The basic structure of Steganography is made up of three components:

1. Carrier
2. Message
3. Key

Carrier - The carrier can be a painting, a digital image, an mp3, even a

TCP/IP packet among other things. It is the object that will carry the
hidden message.
Message - The message (hidden) is being carried by the object (carrier).
Key - A key is used to decode/decipher/discover the hidden message. This
can be anything from a password, a pattern, a black-light, or even lemon
juice.

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Steganography versus Cryptography

Steganography is often confused with cryptology because the two are similar in
the way that they both are used to protect important information.
The difference between two is that steganography involves hiding information so
it appears that no information is hidden at all. If a person or persons views the
object that the information is hidden inside of he or she will have no idea that
there is any hidden information, therefore the person will not attempt to decrypt
the information.
Steganography differs from cryptography in the sense that where cryptography
focuses on keeping the contents of a message secret, steganography focuses on
keeping the existence of a message secret .
Steganography and cryptography are both ways to protect information from
unwanted parties but neither technology alone is perfect and can be
compromised. Once the presence of hidden information is revealed or even
suspected, the purpose of steganography is partly defeated. The strength of
steganography can thus be amplified by combining it with cryptography.

Steganography
Hide, Without altering
Obfuscates the fact of
communication, not the data
Preventative deter attacks

Crypyography
Alter, without hiding
Obfuscates the data, not fact of
the communication
Curative - defends attacks

Two other technologies that are closely related to steganography are

watermarking and fingerprinting. These technologies are mainly concerned with
the protection of intellectual property, thus the algorithms have different
requirements than steganography.

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Different kinds of steganography

Almost all digital file formats can be used for steganography, but the
formats that are more suitable are those with a high degree of redundancy.
Redundancy can be defined as the bits of an object that provide accuracy far
greater than necessary for the objects use and display. The redundant bits of an
object are those bits that can be altered without the alteration being detected
easily . Image and audio files especially comply with this requirement, while
research has also uncovered other file formats that can be used for information
hiding.

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Image Steganography
Image definition
To a computer, an image is a collection of numbers that constitute different light
intensities in different areas of the image. This numeric representation forms a
grid and the individual points are referred to as pixels. Most images on the
Internet consists of a rectangular map of the images pixels (represented as bits)
where each pixel is located and its colour. These pixels are displayed horizontally
row by row.
An image is a rectangular grid of pixels. It has a definite height
definite width counted in pixels.

and a

Each pixel has a color. The color is a 32-bit integer. The first eight bits
determine the redness of the pixel, the next eight bits the greenness, the
next eight bits the blueness, and the remaining eight bits the transparency
of the pixel.

We can think of an image as a function f.

f: R2 R
f (x, y) gives the intensity at position (x, y)
Realistically, we expect the image only to be defined over a
rectangle, with a finite range:
f: [a,b]x[c,d] [0,1]
A color image is just three functions pasted together. We can write this as
a vector-valued function:

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Images are the most popular cover objects used for steganography. In the domain
of digital images many different image file formats exist, most of them for specific
applications. For these different image file formats, different steganographic
algorithms exist.

Image Steganography techniques

There have been many techniques for hiding information or messages in
images in such a manner that the alterations made to the imag.
Image steganography techniques can be divided into two groups:
1) Image Domain
2) Transform Domain
The Common approaches are:

1) Least significant bit insertion (LSB)

2) Masking and filtering
3) Transform techniques

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Least significant bit insertion (LSB)

Least significant bits (LSB) insertion is a simple approach to embedding
information in image file.
The simplest steganographic techniques embed the bits of the message
directly into least significant bit plane of the cover-image in a deterministic
sequence.
Used in BMP and GIF images.

Masking and filtering

Masking and filtering techniques, usually restricted to 24 bits and gray scale
images, hide information by marking an image, in a manner similar to paper
watermarks.
The techniques performs analysis of the image, thus embed the
information in significant areas so that the hidden message is more integral
to the cover image than just hiding it in the noise level.

Transform Techniques
Transform techniques embed the message by modulating coefficients in a
transform domain, such as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) used in
JPEG compression, Discrete Fourier Transform, or Wavelet Transform.
These methods hide messages in significant areas of the cover-image, which
make them more robust to attack.
Transformations can be applied over the entire image, to block through out
the image, or other variants

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Image Compression
In images there are two types of compression: lossy and lossless. Both methods
save storage space, but the procedures that they implement differ.
Lossy compression creates smaller files by discarding excess image data from the
original image. It removes details that are too small for the human eye to
differentiate, resulting in close approximations of the original image, although not
an exact duplicate. An example of an image format that uses this compression
technique is JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group).
Lossless compression, on the other hand, never removes any information from
the original image, but instead represents data in mathematical formulas. The
original images integrity is maintained and the decompressed image output is bitby-bit identical to the original image input. The most popular image formats that
use lossless compression is GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) and 8-bit BMP (a
Microsoft Windows bitmap file).
Compression plays a very important role in choosing which steganographic
algorithm to use. Lossy compression techniques result in smaller image file sizes,
but it increases the possibility that the embedded message may be partly lost due
to the fact that excess image data will be removed. Lossless compression though,
keeps the original digital image intact without the chance of lost, although it does
not compress the image to such a small file size. Different steganographic
algorithms have been developed for both of these compression types and will be
explained in the following sections.

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Future Work
As this project is get done only on introductory level, so lots of further work
required to complete this project titled as Image Steganography (A
technique to hide information within image file)
I decided to follow particularly Least significant bit insertion (LSB)
approach in order

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