4/2/22, 8:12 PM What is Steganography

What is
Steganography?

 
Introduction

Steganography
comes from the Greek word meaning �covered writing.��
Dictionary.com defines steganography as the
hiding of a message within
another so that the presence of the hidden message
is indiscernible<� The
key concept behind steganography is
that the message to be transmitted is
not detectable to the casual eye.� In fact, people who the are not
intended
to be the recipients of the message should not even suspect that a
hidden
message exists.

The
difference between steganography and cryptography is that in
cryptography,
one can tell that a message has been encrypted, but he
cannot decode the
message without knowing the proper key.�
In
steganography, the message itself may not be difficult to decode,
but most
people would not detect the presence of the message.� When combined,
steganography and
cryptography can provide two levels of security.�
Computer programs exist which encrypt a message using
cryptography, and
hide the encryption within an image using steganography.

 
Historical
methods of steganography

In
ancient Greece, people used to write on wax-covered tablets.� The first
documented occurrence of
steganography was in the document The
Histories of Herodotus, when Demeratus
sent a secret message past guards
by removing the wax from the tablet,
writing on the tablet itself, and
covering the tablet with wax again to
disguise the message.� Invisible ink
is a form of steganography used in recent centuries.�

Another
form of steganography is in null ciphers, or unencrypted text
messages.� For example, one could hide a text message
within a paragraph
of words, so that by isolating every 10th word,
the secret message can be
detected.�
The paragraph itself would sound innocent to escape

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detection.� This form of steganography was often used

in wars among
spies.

Recently,
computerized steganography has become popular.� Using
different methods of encoding, secret messages can be
hidden in digital
data, such as .bmp or .jpg images, .wav audio files, or
e-mail messages.�
These methods are
described below.� Authors are able to
watermark their
property in this manner.�
Unfortunately, steganography is also suspected to
play a role in the
communication among terrorist groups around the
world.� In the past year, several suspected that
Osama Bin Laden may have
been posting images on Ebay with hidden messages
inside to send to
different terrorist groups.� Recent attempts to detect the presence of such
images on Ebay
have not uncovered anything, though.

 
 
Types
of encoding

Least
Significant Bit encoding

This
method is the more popular one among encoding images.�
Programs that use the Least Significant
Bit, or LSB, method encode
the message in the least significant bit of
every byte in an image.�
By doing
so, the value of each pixel is changed slightly, but not
enough to make significant
changes to the image.� In a 24-bit
image,
3 bytes are used for each pixel, so each pixel could encode 3 bits
of a
secret message.� The altered
image would look identical to the
human eye, even when compared to the
original.� However, 24-bit
images
are quite large, and are not a popular method of sending
images around the
web, so the fact that they are so large would
arouse suspicion.� A more plausible �container image� would
be a
256 color image, where 1 byte is used for each pixel.� A 640 x 480
image of this quality would
be able to store 300 kilobits of data.�
With a large enough image, one could even hide an image within
another image.� Popular commercial
programs that use LSB encoding
include White Noise Storm and S-Tools.

  

Frequency
Domain encoding

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This
method encodes messages within images by working with the 2-
dimensional
Fast Fourier Transform, or 2-D FFT of the container
image.� The 2-D FFT separates the frequencies of
the image into
rings centered around an axis.� Those rings closest to the axis
represent the low frequencies
of the image, and those furthest away
represent the high frequencies.� In the frequency domain encoding
method,
the secret message is encoded in the middle frequencies of
the image.� This is done by converting the message
text to bits and
overlaying these bits in a ring shape in the desired
frequency band on
the 2-D FFT.� Although
the ring of bits appears dark and outstanding
on the 2-D FFT, the effect on
the image itself is very slight. �Also,
an
image encoded by this method is able to better withstand noise,
compression, translation, and rotation, than images encoded by the
LSB
method.� All of the images we worked
with in this project were
encoded by the nPhaze Boys in this manner using
Matlab.

  

  

  

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