Steganography Hiding Information

Steganography
that is
Hiding information
into pictures and other media
Prof.Dr. Mihly Tth toth.mihaly@szgti.bmf.hu
October 2003 Seminar #1 in HTI
Phenomena of Steganography
Carrying (or Covering) media
Which may be picture, video, sound file, radio communication, even the structure of a File system. The carry medium ought to look innocent.
The hidden information (or the information to hide) called Stego medium or Stego message.
Which may be open message, but may be encrypted one as well.
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The Basic Types of Steganography

Substitutional Steganography
Some elements of the redundant covering medium are substituted by the elements of the stego medium.
Selecting Steganography
Some elements of the covering medium are selected to carry the hidden information. The relevant information is hidden in a narrow-band region of a wide band noise. The hiding (narrow) band is changed by time to time. (Radio Communication.)
The Basic Types of Steganography (cont)

Constructional Steganography
The Stego message is made similar to the structure of the covering medium.
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Some characteristics (1)

The most simple hiding methods (like the substitution) cannot tolerate the edition of the covering medium Compression, picture edition, resizing, printing, copying, etc.. On the other hand it should be a basic requirement, that the hidden information ought to survive such changes of the covering medium

The applied method strongly depends on
The characteristic of the covering medium and The goal of the hiding
There exist cases when we do not want the message being completely hidden (watermark).

There are some cases when hiding has one common feature with encryption, for recovering hidden information one needs a KEY. Nowadays Steganography is applied mostly to put copy right information to the media sold (This is known as electronic watermarking.)
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Ancient methods for hiding (1)

Aineas Taktikosz :Poliokretika (360 A.D. )
Every nth letter of a plaintext had to be read, or nth letters of the words. Passing through a thread on holes of a pottery disc whose holes are meant different letters agreed in advance. Letters on a certain page of a book signed by hardly visible dots. It is applicable for newspapers or letters as well. Cutting the hair of a slave and writing the message to his bald head skin. (Herodotus about 450 A.D.)
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Ancient methods for hiding (2)

Sewing into clothes, shues, collar of a dog, rein of a horse, or anything else. Writing it onto a blown bladder of a cow, then compressing the bladder Writing between the rows of an innocent text by invisible ink.
Naturally our ancestors applied secret writings as well. They used both substitution and permutation of letters and other codes for light signals.
Hiding methods in WW 2
In WW2 the hardly visible dots still were used to denote the selected letters in a newspaper, for example. Many soldiers tried to send home hidden messages that way, but the method was well known by the censors. (If they cannot
discover the hiding method, they mixed the words at least or put the stamp in an other position, etc.)
The encrypton of messages, however, acquired more and more importance.

History of securing information

In ancient times hiding was preferred rather then encryption. Since the middle centuries encryption (vs. Decryption) play more and more important role. Nowadays cryptographic methods are preferred more then hiding (when securing messages).
Goals of hiding nowadays

Hiding Copy-right into media. Identifying message in a hidden way
Identifying the sender or owner Identifying the individual addressee Hiding commercial information
electronic watermarking
In common name:
Hiding message in text

Denotating some way the letters of the carrier text to hide a secret message in it. For example
Hardly visible dots below or above the selected letters or marking them by invisible ink. (Applied from ancient times up to WW. II. Hardly visible dislocation of the selected letters. Very little modification of the shapes of selected fonts. An example of dislocation of letters is shown in the next slide.
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Advantages/disadvantages
Methods when the hidden information is carried by the appearance of the text, (not only the text file.) Such a way the printed or copied text also carries the hidden information. (E.g. a confidential circular letter.) This makes difficult to select out the appropriate letters by a computer. The printing/copying/scanning processes bring additional problems to revoke the hidden text.
Marking the selected letters in a covering text by an other way.

Each font in the text occupies a standard area. That area is not necessarily the same for each font. For example the letter m is generally wider then the letter i. (Proportional vs. fix font size.) Any letter could be moved or modified a bit within its standard font area. Such way particular letters of a carrier text could be marked. The marked letters can be selected out of the text by an appropriate program. (The text could be photocopied as well.)
Moving the font out of its standard area
Done by Mr. rpd Horvth assistant
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Moving the selected fonts

Text processors of Wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) generally cannot do that. (Word, WordPerfect, Desktop publishing softwares, like Adobes PageMaker, FrameMaker) Programmable text processors (like LateX) are able to do. Such application needs a separate selecting program which is able to accept picture files as well. (E.g. scanned or copied texts). This is not a simple job and the addressee must have it in advance. The character recogniser software loose such hidden information.
Modifying fonts
Increasing the lenght of the vertical lines in some characters (like b,d,h,k,l,p,q) with a small amount is not prominent. This also may carry information. Arabic writing allows many decorative variations of the letters in a text Which may be used to mark selected letters. Any proposition?
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Methods for hiding coded information into a text

At the ends of rows we may insert exra spaces. Each space at a row-end may represent a single bit. (Max 3 spaces, for more then 3 could be conspicuous.) In an A4 page there are 50 rows and altogether 50x3 bit= 150 bits (less then 20 bytes) could be hidden such a way. This method can resist compression. One has to read the first letters of words preceded by double spaces. Modifying the font sizes or spaces.
Modifying the structure of the text

Synonims of some words can be used instead of the original word, or changing the linguistic structure of the text (applicable in most cases) Both of the above can be used to hide information. Revocation the hidden information the original text (like a key) is needed. Very small amount of information can be hidden that way. (Goal: identification)
Hiding information into pictures

1.
2.
If the picture (graphics) was made directly for that purpose See the example in the next slide. In so called cover pictures. (We will come back to that.)
Using covering pictures is the most frequent method of hiding information.
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Hiding in covering pictures (1)

Applicability depends upon the way of representing colors. It cannot be applied in case of color palette. In case of the colors represented by 3 color bytes it is applicable, but, Very vulnerable
Neighboring color coordinates may denote very different colors.
Hiding in covering pictures (2)

The color of each pixel) is defined by 3 bytes. (There are a couple of methods defining color. This is just one of them.) The different colors for a pixel can be as many as 2^(8*3)=16 777 216. Though human eye is very sensitive, such an extreme variety of colors cannot be distinguished. The color-
change of a pixel is not visible if the LSBs of the color bytes are changed. (In fact the average number of changes affect half of the color bytes only)
The hidden information is carried by the LSBs of the color bytes.

Color information that belongs to each pixel of a picture
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A rejtett zenet bitjei
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Changes of the three basic (additive) colors (Sat:240, Lum: 120/112)

In the first row the LSB changed by 1 bit In the second row the change is 1 bit at the 16th positional value.
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In an other coordinata system:

255 239 255 239 255 239
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Perhaps some very little change of some colors are visible in the second row of the previous slide. It happened on 256 grade scale of the basic colors. The luminescence is also changed from 120 to 112. 27 Seminar #1 in HTI
Visual experiences
Changing the LSBs of the basic colors cannot be detected by a visual way, at least not on a computer screen. Changing, however, the last four bits of a color byte could be detected visually. The reason for that is in the physiological characteristic of the human eyes. The black and white and gray-scale sensing abilities of the human eyes are much better, but in spite of that the gray-scale pictures are more suitable for hiding information in them. Changing LSBs the average byte change is half of the total number of color bytes.
How much information could be hidden in a picture?

In a Kodak format CD picture the maximum number of pixels are 2048 x 3072 pixel. ( 19 MB) A single digital photo is able to hide 2,3 MB (12 %) information such way that it does not cause any visible change of the picture. I am going to demonstrate it by a program developed by a student of mine, Mr. Pter Teleki. It has been developed exactly for experimental and demonstration purpose and it operates very fast. Instead describing the program I am to show some of its results.
Demonstrating how to hide information in a bitmap format picture

In the following slides I am to show two pictures in each slide. The left picture is the one in which there is no hidden information while the right one contains a text of 4862 bytes in the LSBs of the pixels. To hide that big amount of information we used the LSBs of all three color bytes of the three basic colors.
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LSB hiding in 24 bit bmp picture

The right picture contains 4862 hidden letters
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Sizes of picture files shown

Kand_1 without hidden information Bitmap 308 614 bytes Kand_2 includes hidden information 308 614 bytes
JPG
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21 795 bytes
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21 952 bytes
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Four bit hiding

The following slides demonstrate the case when the second half (i.e. four bits) of the color bytes are used for hiding. In those cases the changing of the picture can be sensed visually too. Exceptionally on the bigger areas of the same or similarly colored parts of the picture.
Steganography (cont.)
Hiding by 1 bit
Hiding by 4 bits
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Though the hiding method shown is very sensitive to the editing of the covering picture, it has a considerable advantage too: It does not increase the size of the covering file for it utilizes its redundancy (As it was shown by bitmap images of Kand sculpture)
Steganography covers even the existence of any hidden message. One disadvantage is that quite an amount of covering information is needed to hide whatever we want to. At least 8 to 10 times more if we really want it to be non detectable. Nevertheless if the fact of the hiding becomes evident then the entire business is virtually useless, if we had not encrypted the information in advance. The really big disadvantage is that editing or compressing the picture do catastrophic damage to the hidden information.
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The electronic watermarking

It has at least two meanings as follows There are
visible and non visible e-watermarks.
The problem is that visibility as such is very subjective. We may talk about hardly visible and very much visible e-watermarks as well.
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Masking
This is a hiding technology which is suitable to produce both
Non-detectable e-watermarks and e-watermarks of different grade of visibility
The carrier medium is modified a suitable way by the information to be the watermark and the colors of the pixels below the mask are modified. The visibility depends upon the amount of modification.
Demonstrating masking (1)
The original picture (18 957 bytes)
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Demonstrating masking (2)

Masking Applied To the Picture. Visible WaterMark (19 296 bytes = + 1,8%
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watermark
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Applying masking
The location of masked stego information within the pictures area is NOT indifferent. Essentially the same technology is applied in case of video tapes or DVDs, but
the watermark is put different locations on the subsequent slides there is no watermark in EVERY slides of the movie.
DCT: Discrete Cosine Transformation

The JPEG technology divides the picture into 8x8 pixels matrices, then it performs a diagonal scanning and quantize the pixels difference to the average pixel color of the 8 by 8 matrix. When quantizing it applies a modified version of FFT.
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Scanning the 8 by 8 pixels matrix
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DCT: Discrete Cosine Transformation

The floating point results got from the scanning and quantizing can be truncated either to downward or upward correlating the bit values to be hidden. This technology is applied mostly to JPEG compressions.
The DCT can be a tool as well to reveal hiding

For the close relation between DFT and DCT the last one could be considered as a kind of discrete frequency spectrum. That spectrum is the one that changes significantly if there is any hidden information in a given picture. In fact, the size of the picture file is also increases when it contains hidden information. It does not recover the hidden information just detects its existence. (Well demonstrate it later.)
The Spread Spectrum Communication

Its principle was invented at the end of the Second WW along with the RADAR technology. Such a communication applies a very wide band spectrum, but At a time a narrow band of that spectrum carries valuable information only, while in all the other part of the spectrum noise is transmitted. In addition the relevant narrow band is changed by time to time following a pattern that has been agreed upon between the communicating partners.HTI December 03 45 Seminar #1 in
Hiding information into sound tracks (1)

The carrier is a digitized audio information. In case of digital sound CDs the sampling frequency standard is 44 kHz and the quantizing resolution is at least 12 bits. That yields an amplitude scale of 4096 levels, in which changing the LSB means a 0.025 % relative modification which is essentially a distortion. Such an extremely little distortion cannot be perceived by human ear. In case of silent parts of a sound track it still may be overheard.
Hiding information into sound tracks(2)

Both the hiding and the recovering technology is essentially the same as it was shown in case of covering pictures. Naturally it needs computer and appropriate program. Some commercial studio software are prepared in advance to insert e-watermarks.
Summary (1)
The meaning of Steganography is hiding information and the related technologies. There is a principal difference between Steganography and Encryption, however they can meet at some points too. They can be applied together, i.e. encrypted information can be hidden in addition. (As it will be demonstrated soon.)
Summary (2)
To hide something a covering medium is always needed. (Picture, sound track, text or even the structure of a file system, etc.) The covering medium must be redundant, otherwise the hidden information could be detected easily.
(This is the conception of hiding into noise.)
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Summary (3)
The technology of hiding should match the nature of the medium. The hidden information should not be lost, if the carrying medium is edited, modified, formatted, re-sized, compressed or printed. Thats a difficult task to realize.
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Summary (4)
Its an expectation as well, that the fact of hidden information should be impossible to detect by other then the addressee. On the other hand security services should have methods to detect such information. At least its existence. Realizing a good trade-off there are different technologies.
Summary (5)
Nowadays the most popular application of Steganography is hiding copy rights and other commercial information. Such kind of hidden information is known as e-watermark. The e-watermark is not always invisible. There are cases when it is made deliberately strikingly visible. E.g. in case of trial versions of software.
Now a demonstration of a commercial stego software will commence!

http://www.invisiblesecrets.com
October 2003
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Steganography Hiding Information

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Steganography

The Basic Types of Steganography

The Basic Types of Steganography (cont)

Some characteristics (1)

Some characteristics (2)

Some characteristics (3)

Ancient methods for hiding (1)

Ancient methods for hiding (2)

The encrypton of messages, however, acquired more and more importance.

History of securing information

Goals of hiding nowadays

Hiding message in text

Marking the selected letters in a covering text by an other way.

Moving the font out of its standard area

Done by Mr. rpd Horvth assistant

Moving the selected fonts

Methods for hiding coded information into a text

Modifying the structure of the text

Hiding information into pictures

Hiding in covering pictures (1)

Hiding in covering pictures (2)

The hidden information is carried by the LSBs of the color bytes.

A rejtett zenet bitjei

Changes of the three basic (additive) colors (Sat:240, Lum: 120/112)

In an other coordinata system:

How much information could be hidden in a picture?

Demonstrating how to hide information in a bitmap format picture

LSB hiding in 24 bit bmp picture

Sizes of picture files shown

Four bit hiding

The electronic watermarking

Demonstrating masking (1)

The original picture (18 957 bytes)

Demonstrating masking (2)

DCT: Discrete Cosine Transformation

Scanning the 8 by 8 pixels matrix

DCT: Discrete Cosine Transformation

The DCT can be a tool as well to reveal hiding

The Spread Spectrum Communication

Hiding information into sound tracks (1)

Hiding information into sound tracks(2)

(This is the conception of hiding into noise.)

Now a demonstration of a commercial stego software will commence!

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