IMPLEMENTATION OF STEGANOGRAPHY TOOL USING LSB Technique

-Presented by :

What is steganography?
The art of concealing the existence of information within seemingly innocuous carriers
Hiding information in plain sight

steganography comes from the Greek

Stegano = covered, graphy = writing

Steganography vs cryptography
Cryptography
Attempts to hide the meaning of the message by scrambling it so that if it is intercepted, it cannot be understood An encrypted message may draw suspicion

Steganography
Attempts to hide the actual existence of the message by camouflaging it By concealing the fact that a message is being sent altogether, no suspicion is raised

Examples of steganography through history

In ancient Greece, text was written on wax covered tablets
steganographic technique:
scrape the wax off the tablet Write a message on the underlying wood Cover the tablet with wax again It now looks like a blank tablet (or write an innocuous message in the wax)

 shave the head of a messenger tattoo a message or image on the messengers head allow the hair to grow back the message would be undetected until the head was shaved again

Secret compartments
e.g. hide a message inside a nail, then hammer this nail into a piece of wood with many other nails

 The real message is "camouflaged" in an innocent sounding message innocent message:

Fishing freshwater bends and saltwater coasts rewards anyone feeling stressed. Resourceful anglers usually find masterful leapers fun and admit swordfish rank overwhelming anyday.

Null ciphers (unencrypted messages)

Take 3rd letter of every word to get the secret message:

Send lawyers guns and money

Retrieval of message
In order to retrieve the secret message, the recipient must know the method used to hide it
E.g. must know:
To scrape off wax To shave head of messenger Which nail contains the message That every 3rd letter must be extracted

Steganography in the computer age

Steganographic software is relatively new and can be very effective Such software enables information to be hidden in graphics, sound files and seemingly "blank" media There is some fear that it could be abused
e.g. to embed viruses in images

Example: hiding information in an image file

in the computer, an image is an array of numbers that represent light intensities (i.e., colours) at various points (pixels) in the image
A common resolution for complex images is 1024 x 768 pixels
This means that the pixels are really, really small!

Steganography in images
Way images are stored:
Array of numbers representing RGB values for each pixel Common images are in 8-bit/pixel and 24-bit/pixel format. 24-bit images have lot of space for storage but are huge and invite compression 8-bits are good options. Proper selection of cover image is important. Best candidates: gray scale images .. Cashing on limitations of perception in human vision

 There are usually two type of files used when embedding data into an image
the innocent looking image which will hold the hidden information is a "container" a "message" is the information to be hidden
may be plain-text, ciphertext, other images, sound, etc. message will be embedded in the least significant bits (LSB) of the container image.

Least Significant Bit method

Consider a 24 bit picture Data to be inserted: character A: (10000011) Host pixels: 3 pixel will be used to store one character of 8-bits The pixels which would be selected for holding the data are chosen on the basis of the key which can be a random number. Ex: 00100111 11101001 11001000
00100111 11001000
Embedding A 00100111 00100110 11001001

11001000 00100111

11101001 11101001
11101000 11001000 00100111 11001000 11101000 11101001

According to researchers on an average only 50% of the pixels actually change from 0-1 or 1-0.

Sample palettes

Drastic & Subtle shade variations

Red color shade variations

Gray Scale shade variations

Masking and filtering

Hide information by marking an image in a manner similar to paper watermarks. Watermarking techniques integrate a data in image Faint but perceptible signal is covered by another one that makes the first non-perceptible to human eye. No destruction of data with image compression. Used widely for digital watermarking and fingerprinting. Used for hiding a image within another.

Masking and filtering (contd.)

Cover pixel : 01011100 Secret image pixel: 11101010 Resultant pixel: 01011101 (3+5) The contribution of each pixel can be varied to achieve desired effect.

TOP SECRET

8-bit (256 grayscale) images.

Example: Copyright Fabian A.P. Petitcolas, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fapp2/steganography/image_downgrading/

Sacrificing 2 bits of cover to carry 2 bits of secret image

Original Image

Extracted Image

Sacrificing 5 bits of cover to carry 5 bits of secret image

Original Image

Extracted Image

Conclusion
Steganography has its place in the security. On its own, it wont serve much but when used as a layer of cryptography, it would lead to a greater security. Far fetched applications in privacy protection and intellectual property rights protection. Research is going on in both the directions One is how to incorporate hidden or visible copyright information in various media, which would be published. At the same time, in opposite direction, researcher are working on how to detect the trafficking of illicit material & covert messages published by certain outlawed groups.

QUESTION ????