Steeganography and Acoustic Cryptanalysis

Bharath Raja
Department of Compter Science and Engineering SSN college of Engineering kalavakkam, Kancheepuram Tamilnadu 603 110 Tel: 9788936234
Email:bharathraja@live.com Abstract : Steganography is the art of hiding information information in other information to make sure that it unknown for the outsides that communication takes place. There are a lot of methods to hide data in a peice of information. Images are the mostly used media to hide the secret message. Steganography is being used from the times of World War. Since then, the method and algorithm used is being greately improvised. Acoustic cryptanalysis is a side channel attack which exploits sounds, audible or not, produced during a computation or input-output operation by computer workstations, impact printers, or electromechanical cipher machines. While cryptography is the process of encrypting(scrambling) the date, steganography is the process of hiding the concealing the message with another message. This paper intends to give detailed view of Steganography techniques and it's types. It also gives a brief view about the Acoustic cryptanalysis, which methodology is much suitable for which application. Keywords

I. INTRODUCTION Since the rise of the Internet one of the most important factors of information technology and communication has been the security of information. Cryptography was created as a technique for securing the secrecy of communication and many different methods have been developed to encrypt and decrypt data in order to keep the message secret. Unfortunately it is sometimes not enough to keep the contents of a message secret, it may also be necessary to keep the existence of the message secret. The technique used to implement this, is called steganography. Steganography is the art and science of invisible communication. This is accomplished through hiding information in other information, thus hiding the existence of the communicated information. The word steganography is derived from the Greek words stegos meaning cover and grafia meaning writing defining it as covered writing. The idea and practice of hiding information has a long history. In Histories the Greek historian Herodotus writes of a nobleman, Histaeus, who needed to communicate with his son-in-law in Greece. He shaved the head of one of his most trusted slaves and tattooed the message onto the slaves scalp. When the slaves hair grew back the slave was dispatched with the hidden message . In the Second World War the Microdot technique was developed by the Germans. Information, especially photographs, was reduced in size until it was the size of a typed period. Extremely difficult to detect, a normal cover message was sent over an insecure channel with one of the periods on the paper containing hidden information . Today steganography is mostly used on computers with digital data being the carriers and networks being the high speed delivery channels. 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. The advantage of steganography, over cryptography alone, is that messages do not attract attention to themselves. The strength of steganography can thus be amplified by combining it with cryptography. 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. These requirements of a good steganographic algorithm will be discussed below. In watermarking all of the instances of an object are marked in the same way. With fingerprinting on the other hand, different, unique marks are embedded in distinct copies of the carrier object that are supplied to different customers. A successful attack on a steganographic system consists of an adversary observing that there is information hidden inside a file, while a successful attack on a watermarking or fingerprinting system would not be to detect the mark, but to remove it .

II. OVERVIEW From ancient times, lots of methods have been used to establish secret communication through Ssteganography. In China, war messages are written in pieces of silk, rolled into a ball and swallowed by the messenger. In Rome and Greece, messages were carved in wooden pieces and dipped in wax to cover the writing. Invisible inks were also used which could only be revealed by heating the paper at certain temperature or treated with other substance. Microdots were also used for this purpose.

III. TYPES OF STEGANOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE There are vaious types of Steganography technique being used in recent times. Few of them are listed below Physical Digital Network Printed Text And now recently Steganography is also being implemented using Su-do-ku puzzles.

An obvious method was to hide a secret message in every nth letter of every word of a text message. It is only since the beginning of the Internet and all the different digital file formats that is has decreased in importance. Text steganography using digital files is not used very often since text files have a very small amount of redundant data. Given the proliferation of digital images, especially on the Internet, and given the large amount of redundant bits present in the digital representation of an image, images are the most popular cover objects for steganography. This paper will focus on hiding information in images in the next sections. To hide information in audio files similar techniques are used as for image files. One different technique unique to audio steganography is masking, which exploits the properties of the human ear to hide information unnoticeably. A faint, but audible, sound becomes inaudible in the presence of another louder audible sound. This property creates a channel in which to hide information. Although nearly equal to images in steganographic potential, the larger size of meaningful audio files makes them less popular to use than images. There is a term protocol steganography, that refers to the technique of embedding information within messages and network control protocols used in network transmission. In the layers of the OSI network model there exist covert channels where steganography can be used. An example of where information can be hidden is in the header of a TCP/IP packet in some fields that are either optional or are never used. IV. TEXT STEGANOGRAPHY Apparently neutral's protest is thoroughly discounted and ignored. Isman hard hit. Blockade issue affects pretext for embargo on by-products, ejecting suets and vegetable oils this is a message sent by a German Spy in World War II. Initially reading, it makes no sense, but it's a cipher. Take a look at the second letter of all the words in the context. Apparently neutral's protest is thoroughly discounted and ignored. Isman hard hit. Blockade issue affects pretext for embargo on by -products, ejecting suets and vegetable oils which reads as follows, pershingsailsfromnyjunei which can be logically separated as

Pershing sails from NY june 1 This is one of the basic methods of text steganography. Usually, the secret message is encrypted before hidden inside another information at the nth position. Encryption is another whole topic, and we concentrate much on steganography here. Yet, a basic principal of encription is adding a number x to the number corresponding to the alphabeti and taking modulus of 26. For example, lets say x is 5 and n is 2. The data to be sent is: Mission successfull The cipher made from the key 5 is: rnxxnts xzhhjxxkzqq Now the message is hidden in a paragraph at the nth position, here 2nd :

Bring knob. Expected experience knob at assignment excercise. Ozone shiney shelter eject extraordinary exemplary. Okay ozone aquaintance aquarium. This is the basic text steganography. There is alos another way in which bits of data are sent by using intendation or the spacing between two words. A sigle space denotes logical 0 and double space denotes logical 1. Initially the message is converted into binary digits and then it's being hidden in any content. For example, the message: hi The number values for these numbers is: 7 8 (assuming 'a' starts with 0) The binary equallent is: 0111 1000 This can be hidden in any text content by adding spaces: This is a sample message that implements steganography technique 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 Certain softwares can be used to identify the indentations and thus derive the needed message
V. DIGITAL STEGANOGRAPHY This is the most widely used steganography method. Here all digital datas including, Images, audio and video are used to hide the data. But Image steganography is more widely used.

A)Image steganography
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. 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. The number of bits in a colour scheme, called the bit depth, refers to the number of bits used for each pixel. The smallest bit depth in current colour schemes is 8, meaning that there are 8 bits used to describe the colour of each pixel. Monochrome and greyscale images use 8 bits for each pixel and are able to display 256 different colours or shades of grey. Digital colour images are typically stored in 24-bit files and use the RGB colour model, also known as true colour. All colour variations for the pixels of a 24-bit image are derived from three primary colours: red, green and blue, and each primary colour is represented by 8 bits. Thus in one given pixel, there can be 256 different quantities of red, green and blue, adding up to more than 16-million combinations, resulting in more than 16-million colours Image steganograpy can be done in two groups, 1)Image domain 2) Transform domain The basic method used in image steganography is Least Significant Bit- LSB (Image domain)

LSB
Least significant bit (LSB) insertion is a common, simple approach to embedding information in a cover image . The least significant bit (in other words, the 8th bit) of some or all of the bytes inside an image is changed to a bit of the secret message. When using a 24-bit image, a bit of each of the red, green and blue colour components can be used, since they are each represented by a byte. In other words, one can store 3 bits in each pixel. An 800 600 pixel image, can thus store a total amount of 1,440,000 bits or 180,000 bytes of embedded data. For example a grid for 3 pixels of a 24-bit image can be as follows: (00101101 (10100110 (11010010 00011100 11000100 10101101 11011100) 00001100) 01100011)

When the number 200, which binary representation is 11001000, is embedded into the least significant bits of this part of the image, the resulting grid is as follows:

(00101101 (10100110 (11010010

00011101 11000101 10101100

11011100) 00001100) 01100011)

Although the number was embedded into the first 8 bytes of the grid, only the 3 underlined bits needed to be changed according to the embedded message. On average, only half of the bits in an image will need to be modified to hide a secret message using the maximum cover size. Since there are 256 possible intensities of each primary colour, changing the LSB of a pixel results in small changes in the intensity of the colours. These changes cannot be perceived by the human eye - thus the message is successfully hidden. With a well-chosen image, one can even hide the message in the least as well as second to least significant bit and still not see the difference . In its simplest form, LSB makes use of BMP images, since they use lossless compression. Unfortunately to be able to hide a secret message inside a BMP file, one would require a very large cover image. Nowadays, BMP images of 800 600 pixels are not often used on the Internet and might arouse suspicion. For this reason, LSB steganography has also been developed for use with other image file formats.

The following example is a sample of Image steganography:

Image of a tree with a steganographically hidden image. The hidden image is revealed by removing all but the two least significant bits of each color component and a subsequent normalization. The hidden image is shown int the right, a sleeping cat. The following table compares least significant bit (LSB) insertion in BMP and in GIF files, JPEG compression steganography, the patchwork approach and spread spectrum techniques, according to the needed requirement: LSB in BMP LSB in GIF JPEG compression Patchwork Spread spectrum Invisibility Payload capacity Robustness (statistical attacks) Robustness against imageb manipulation Independent of file format Unsuspicious files High* High Low Low Low Low Medium* Medium Low Low Low Low High Medium Medium Medium Low High High Low High High High High High Medium High Medium High High

* Depends on cover image used

B)Audio Steganography
Audio steganography is concerned with embedding information in an innocuous cover speech in a secure and robust manner. Communication and transmission security and robustness are essential for transmitting vital information to intended sources while denying access to unauthorized persons. By hiding the information using a cover or host audio as a wrapper, the existence of the information is concealed during transmission. This is critical in applications such as battlefield communications and bank transactions, for example.

The tone insertion method relies on the inaudibility of low power tones in the presence of significantly higher spectral components an indirect exploitation of the psychoacoustic masking phenomenon in the spectral domain. Experiments were conducted using utterances from (a) the TIMIT database, and (b) the Greenflag database consisting of noisy recordings of air traffic controllers, as host or cover audio samples.

To study the effect of noise on the recovery of embedded information, Gaussian noise with zero mean and average power proportional to the frame power of embedded stego was added to each frame. Random noise at low power is unlikely to increase the power of any of the three tones to a level that exceeds the power level of the significant tone. Hence, the pair of the embedded bits from each of the noise-added stego frames was successfully recovered up to noise power set to 25 percent of frame power. In a experiment using the TIMIT utterance, She had your dark suit in greasy wash water all year, which is available as 16 bit samples at the rate of 16,000 per second, nonoverlapped frames of 256 samples were used to embed one bit in each. With 208 frames, a random data of 208 bits were embedded by inserting tones at 1875 Hz and 2625 Hz with appropriate powers, and the toneinserted stego signal was quantized to 16 bits for transmission. From informal listening tests and from the spectrograms, the stego signal was found indistinguishable from the unembedded host audio signal.

In another experiment, four tones were used to embed two bits in each frame. In addition, successive frames for embedding were overlapped with 50 percent to further increase the payload capacity. After verifying the imperceptibility of and the data recovery from the stego signal, the technique was extended for use in covert battlefield communication in which the hidden information can be another utterance. For initial studies, the utterance, seven one spoken by a male speaker, was used as the covert message. This utterance was represented in the Global System for Mobile communication half-rate (GSM 06.20) coding scheme resulting in a compact form of 2800 bits. Two TIMIT utterances Thus technical efficiency is achieved at the expense of actual experience and His captain was thin and haggard and his beautiful boots were worn and shabby each with 16 bit samples and 16,000 samples/s) were concatenated to accommodate the large covert information size. With two bits inserted in each host frame of 256 samples, only the first 1400 overlapped frames out of a total of 1542 were used for embedding all the covert message bits. This gives an embedding capacity of 2800 bits in 11.208 s , or 249.82 bits/s.

The Illustration show the host and the stego signals and their spectrograms using the frequency-hopped four-tone insertion for embedding the covert message. No perceptual or otherwise detectible difference was noticed between the host and the stego signals and all the embedded data were correctly recovered from the stego signal. VI. STEGANALYSIS Seganalysis is the process of detection of steganographically encoded packages. The simplest method to detect

modified files, however, is to compare them to known originals. For example, to detect information being moved through the graphics on a website, an analyst can maintain known-clean copies of these materials and compare them against the current contents of the site. The differences, assuming the carrier is the same, will compose the payload. In general, using extremely high compression rate makes steganography difficult, but not impossible. While compression errors provide a hiding place for data, high compression reduces the amount of data available to hide the payload in, raising the encoding density and facilitating easier detection (in the extreme case, even by casual observation). Steganalysis can have a two-sided approach that involves detecting both artifacts and signatures of known steganography applications. All files on a suspect filesystem can be hashed using a hash function and then compared to a hash table of known steganography applications to show that a particular steganography application is, or was, present on the system at some point in time. The second step in the steganalysis process is to search all files on a suspect filesystem for signatures (uniquely identifiable byte patterns) that act as identifiers that are embedded as a result of hiding the information. A similar approach can be used to scan files over network links in real-time. VII. ACOUSTIC CRYPTANALYSIS Acoustic cryptanalysis is a side channel attack which exploits sounds emitted by computers or machines. Modern acoustic cryptanalysis mostly focuses on sounds emitted by computer keyboards and internal computer components. Most side-channel attack research has focused on electromagnetic emanations (TEMPEST), power consumption and, recently, diffuse visible light from CRT displays. The oldest eavesdropping channel, namely acoustic emanations, has received little attention. Our preliminary analysis of acoustic emanations from personal computers shows them to be a surprisingly rich source of information on CPU activity. In his book Spycatcher, former MI5 operative Peter Wright discusses use of an acoustic attack against Egyptian Hagelin cipher machines in 1956. The attack was codenamed "ENGULF". In 2004, Dmitri Asonov and Rakesh Agrawal of the IBM Almaden Research Center announced that computer keyboards and keypads used on telephones and automated teller machines (ATMs) are vulnerable to attacks based on differentiating the sound produced by different keys. Their attack employed a neural network to recognize the key being pressed.By analyzing recorded sounds, they were able to recover the text of data being entered. These techniques allow an attacker using covert listening devices to obtain passwords, passphrases, personal identification numbers (PINs) and other information entered via keyboards.In 2005, a group of UC Berkeley researchers performed a number of practical

experiments demonstrating the validity of this kind of threat. Also in 2004, Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer demonstrated that it may be possible to conduct timing attacks against a CPU performing cryptographic operations by analysis of variations in its humming noise (that is, its high-frequency humming noise, not the louder low-frequency humming of its cooling fan). One obvious countermeasure is to use sound dampening equipment, such as "sound-proof" boxes, that is designed to sufficiently attenuate all relevant frequencies. Conversely, a sufficiently strong wide-band noise source can mask the informative signals, though ergonomic concerns may render this unattractive. Careful circuit design and highquality electronic components can probably reduce the emanations. Alternatively, one can employ known algorithmic techniques to reduce the usefulness of the emanations to attacker. These techniques ensure the rough-scale behavior of the algorithm is independent of the inputs it receives; they usually carry some performance penalty, but are often already used to thwart other side-channel attacks. Eavesdropping on keyboard keystrokes has been often discussed; keys can be distinguished by timing, or (as recently proposed by Asonov and Agrawal) by their different sounds. While this attack is applicable to data that is entered manually (e.g., passwords), it is not applicable to larger secret data such as RSA keys. Another acoustic source is hard disk head seeks; this source does not appear very useful in the presence of caching, delayed writes and multitasking. Preceding modern computers, one may recall MI5's "ENGULF" technique (recounted in Peter Wright's book Spycatcher), whereby a phone tap was used to eavesdrop on the operation of an Egyptian embassy's Hagelin cipher machine, thereby recovering its secret key.

The following is a recording of GnuPG 1.2.4 signing a short message using a random precomputed 4096-bit RSA key. The signature is repeated twice, each time preceded by a sleep state (HLT instruction), manifesting as wideband noise. GnuPG uses CRT-based exponentiation for signing, and this is visible in the spectrogram: the duration of each signature is partitioned into two similar but distinct stages, corresponding to exponentiation modulo p and modulo q. VIII. CONCLUSION Thus most types of steganoraphy have been discussed and an overview of cryptography have been given. Few examples have been givn in each section and few Experimental records have been submitted too. Thus although these steganography techniques are roburst, they are not always fool-proof. Once detected, steganography looses its vital importance. Thus i conclude that both cryptography and steganography are used to securely hide a data.