INTRODUCTION With advancements in digital communication technology andthe growth of computer power and storage, the difficulties in ensuring

individuals privacy become increasingly challenging. The degrees towhich individuals appreciate privacy differ from one person toanother. Various methods have been investigated and developed toprotect personal privacy. Encryption is probably the most obviousone, and then comes steganography.Steganography is an old art which has been in practice sincetime unknown. Steganography, from the Greek, means covered orsecret writing and is thus the art of hiding messages insideinnocuous cover carriers, e.g. images, audio, video, text, or any otherdigitally represented code or transmission, in such a manner that theexistence of the embedded messages is undetectable. The hiddenmessage may be plaintext, ciphertext, or anything that can berepresented as a bit stream. Encryption lends itself to noise and isgenerally observed while steganography is not observable.Steganography and cryptography, though closely related, they are notthe same. The former has the intent to hide the existence of themessage whereas the later scrambles a message to absoluteillegibility.The goal of steganography is to avoid drawing suspicion to thetransmission of a hidden message. It hide messages inside otherharmless messages in a way that does not allow any enemy to evendetect that there is a second secret message present. If suspicion israised, then this goal is defeated. Discovering and rendering uselesssuch covert messages is another art form known as steganalysis.

This approach of information hiding technique has recently becomeimportant in a number of application areas. Digital audio, video, andpictures are increasingly furnished with distinguishing butimperceptible marks, which may contain a hiding copyright notice orserial number or even help to prevent unauthorized copying directly.Military communications system make increasing use of trafficsecurity technique which, rather than merely concealing the content ofa message using encryption, seek to conceal its sender, its receiveror its very existence. Similar techniques are used in some mobilephone systems and schemes proposed for digital elections. 1.1 Steganography Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages insuch a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient,suspects the existence of the message, a form of security throughobscurity.

Figure: The different embodiment disciplines of Information Hiding.The arrow indicates an extension and bold face indicates the focus ofthis study.Intuitively, this work makes use of some nomenclaturecommonly used by steganography and watermarking communities. The term cover image is used throughout this thesis to describe theimage designated to carry the embedded bits. An image with embedded data, payload, is described as stego image whilesteganalysis or attacks refer to different image processing andstatistical analysis approaches that aim to break steganographyalgorithms. People use to confuse steganography with cryptography,which is wrong.Steganography and cryptography, though closely related, theyare altogether different. The former hides the existence of themessage, while the latter scrambles a message so that it cannot beunderstood (Sellars, 1999). But the two techniques must not beperceived as mutually exclusive and if used together can prove morepowerful. As we have said of steganography, the embedded data isnot necessarily encrypted; hidden message may be plaintext,ciphertext, or anything that can be represented as a bit stream.Embedding encrypted message could be more secure and effective.

4 Figure 1: General scheme of steganography 1.2 Steganography vs. Cryptography Basically, the purpose of cryptography and steganography is toprovide secret communication. However, steganography is not thesame as cryptography. Cryptography hides the contents of a secretmessage from a malicious people, whereas steganography evenconceals the existence of the message. Steganography must not beconfused with cryptography, where we transform the message so asto make it meaning obscure to a malicious people who intercept it.Therefore, the definition of breaking the system is different [6]. Incryptography, the system is broken when the attacker can read thesecret message. Breaking a steganographic system need the attackerto detect that steganography has been used and he is able to readthe embedded message.In cryptography, the structure of a message is scrambled tomake it meaningless and unintelligible unless the decryption key isavailable. It makes no attempt to disguise or hide the encodedmessage. Basically, cryptography offers the ability of transmittinginformation between persons in a way that prevents

a third party fromreading it. Cryptography can also provide authentication for verifyingthe identity of someone or something

In contrast, steganography does not alter the structure of thesecret message, but hides it inside a cover-image so it cannot beseen. A message in ciphertext, for instance, might arouse suspicion on the part of the recipient while an invisible message created withsteganographic methods will not. In other word, steganographyprevents an unintended recipient from suspecting that the data exists.In addition, the security of classical steganography system relies onsecrecy of the data encoding system. Once the encoding system isknown, the steganography system is defeated.It is possible to combine the techniques by encryptingmessage using cryptography and then hiding the encrypted messageusing steganography. The resulting stego-image can be transmittedwithout revealing that secret information is being exchanged.Furthermore, even if an attacker were to defeat the steganographictechnique and detect the message from the stego-object, he wouldstill require the cryptographic decoding key to decipher the encryptedmessage.Table below shows a comparision between the threetechniques

. Criterion/Method Steganography Watermarking Cryptography Carrier any digital media mostlyimage/audio files usually textbased,with someextensionsto image files Secret data

payload watermark plain text no changes to the structure changes thestructure Key optional necessary Detection

blind usually blind

35 (1) The title of the picture and some physical object information(2) The date and the time when the picture was taken(3) The camera and the photographer's informationFormerly, these are annotated beside the each picture in thealbum.Recently, almost all cameras are digitalized. They are cheap inprice, easy to use, quick to shoot. They eventually made people feelreluctant to work on annotating each picture. Now, most home PC'sare stuck with the huge amount of photo files. In this situation it is very hard to find a specific shot in the piles of pictures. Photo albumsoftware" may help a little. You can sort the pictures and put a coupleof annotation words to each photo. When you want to find a specificpicture, you can make a search by keywords for the target picture.However, the annotation data in such software are not unified with thetarget pictures. Each annotation only has a link to the picture.Therefore, when you transfer the pictures to a different albumsoftware, all the annotation data are lost.This problem is technically referred to as "Metadata (e.g.,annotation data) in a media database system (a photo albumsoftware) are separated from the media data (photo data) in thedatabase managing system (DBMS)." This is a big problem.Steganography can solve this problem because asteganography program unifies two types of data into one by way ofembedding operation. So, metadata can easily be transferred fromone system to another without hitch. Specifically, you can embed allyour good/bad memory (of your sight-seeing trip) in each snap shot ofthe digital photo. You can either send the embedded picture to your

36 friend to extract your memory on his/her PC, or you may keep it silentin your own PC to enjoy extracting the memory ten years after.If a "motion picture steganography system" has beendeveloped in the near future, a keyword based movie-scene retrievingsystem will be implemented. It will be a step to a "semantic movieretrieval system."Steganography is also employed in various useful applications,e.g., for human rights organizations, as encryption is prohibited insome countries (Frontline Defenders, 2003), copyright control ofmaterials, enhancing robustness of image search engines and smart IDs, identity cards, where individuals details are embedded in their photographs (Jain & Uludag, 2002). Other applications are videoaudio synchronization, companies safe circulation of secret data, TV broadcasting, TCP/IP packets, for instance a unique ID can beembedded into an image to analyze the network traffic of particularusers (Johnson &Jajodia, 1998), and also checksum embedding(Chang et al., 2006a) and (Bender et al.,2000).In (Petitcolas, 2000), the author demonstrated somecontemporary applications, one of which was in Medical ImagingSystems where a separation was considered necessary for confidentiality between patients image data or DNA sequences andtheir captions, e.g., physician, patients name, address and other

particulars. A link must be maintained between the image data andthe personal information. Th us, embedding the patients information in the image could be a useful safety measure and helps in solving suchproblems. Steganography would provide an ultimate guarantee ofauthentication that no other security tool may ensure. Miaou (Miaou etal., 2000) present an LSB embedding technique for electronic patient

37 records based on bi-polar multiple-base data hiding. A pixel valuedifference between an original image and its JPEG version is taken tobe a number conversion base.Mobile phone and Internet technologies have progressed alongeach other. The importance of both these technologies has resulted inthe creation of a new technology for establishing wireless Internetconnection through mobile phone, known as Wireless ApplicationProtocol (WAP). However, considering the importance of the issue ofdata security and especially establishing hidden communications,many methods have been presented. In the meanwhile,steganography is a relatively new method.In this paper, a method forhidden exchange of data has been presented by using steganographyon WML pages (WML stands for Wireless Markup Language, which isa language for creating web pages for the WAP). The main idea inthis method is hiding encoded data in the ID attribute of WMLdocument tags. The coder program in this method has beenimplemented using the Java language. The decoder program to beimplemented on the mobile phone has been written with a version ofJava language

specifically used for small devices, which is calledJ2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition).Inspired by the notion that steganography can be embeddedas part of the normal printing process, the Japanese firm Fujitsu isdeveloping technology to encode data into a printed picture that isinvisible to the human eye, but can be decoded by a mobile phonewith a camera as exemplified in Figure (BBC News, 2007).