IMAGE PROCESSING STEGANOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUE

(TRANSMITTING SECRET MESSAGES)

M.SILAMBHARASAN & V.VINOTH KUMAR DEPT. OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING MAHENDRA ENGINEERING COLLEGE

INTRODUCTION Steganography, a word derived from Greek meaning covered writing, is the hiding of a secret message inside another message so that no one can detect or decode the secret message. Steganography is used in spying both corporate and in the intelligence industry, the entertainment industry for copyright purposes, and there is speculation that terrorists use it for some means of communication as well. DEFINITION Steganography (also known as "steg" or "stego") is "the art of writing in cipher, or in characters, which are not intelligible except to persons who have the key; cryptography". In computer terms, steganography has evolved into the practice of hiding a message within a larger one in such a way that others cannot discern the presence or contents of the hidden message. In contemporary terms, steganography has evolved into a digital strategy of hiding a file in some form of multimedia, such as an image, an audio file (like a .wav or .mp3) or even a video file. Steganography encompasses methods of transmitting secret messages through safe cover carriers in such a manner that the very existence of the embedded messages is undetectable. Creative methods have been devised in the hiding process to reduce the visible detection of the embedded messages. Hiding information, where electronic media are used as such carriers, requires alterations of the media properties which may introduce some form of degradation. If applied to images that degradation, at times, may be visible to the human eye and point to signatures of the steganographic methods used. These signatures may actually broadcast the existence of the embedded message, thus defeating the purpose of steganography, which is hiding the existence of a message.

IMPORTANT ASPECTS Two aspects of attacks on steganography are of the embedded message. Any image can be manipulated with the intent of destroying some hidden information whether an embedded message exists or not. Detecting the existence of a hidden message will save time in the message elimination phase by processing only those images that contain hidden information. Detecting an embedded message also defeats the primary goal of steganography, that of concealing the vary existence of a hidden message. EVOLUTION OF THE MESSAGE PASSING TECHNIQUE * Hidden messages in wax tablets: in ancient Greece, people wrote messages on the wood, and then covered it with wax so that it looked like an ordinary, unused, tablet. * Hidden messages on messenger's body: also in ancient Greece. Herodotus tells the story of a message tattooed on a slave's shaved head, hidden by the growth of his hair, and exposed by shaving his head again. The message, if the story is true, carried a warning to Greece about Persian invasion plans. * Hidden messages on paper written in secret inks under other messages or on the blank parts of other messages. TERMINOLOGY The possible cover carriers are innocent looking carriers (images, audio, video, text, or some other digitally representative code) which will hold the hidden information. A message is the information hidden and may be plain text, cipher text, images, or anything that can be embedded into a bit stream. Together the cover carrier and the embedded message create a stego-carrier. Hiding information may require a stego key which is additional secret information, such as a password, required for embedding the information. For example, when a secret message is hidden within a cover image, the resulting product is a stego-image. A possible formula of the process may be represented as: Cover medium + embedded message + stego key = stego-medium

Comparison of steganography vs. cryptography New terminology with respect to attacks and breaking steganography schemes is similar to cryptographic terminology; however, there are some significant differences. Just as a

cryptanalyst applies cryptanalysis in an attempt to decode or crack encrypted messages, the steganalyst is one who applies steganalysis in an attempt to detect the existence of hidden information. With cryptography, comparison is made between portions of the plain text

(possibly none) and portions of the cipher text. In steganography, comparisons may be made between the cover-media, the stego-media, and possible portions of the message. The end result in cryptography is the cipher text, while the end result in steganography is the stego-media. The message in steganography may or may not be encrypted. If it is encrypted, then if the message is extracted, the cryptanalysis techniques may be applied. TYPES OF STEGANOGRAPHY There exist two types of steganography. These two types are fragile and robust. Fragile steganography is where the contents of the message can be destroyed if the stego-object is altered in any way. This can happen in many ways such as using a lossy compression technique to compress a stego-object that uses Least Significant Bit encoding. There are legitimate uses for fragile steganography such as ensuring the integrity of a file. Robust steganography is where the embedded message cannot be easily altered or destroyed. SYSTEM STUDY Least Significant Bit insertion protocol hides the information in the least significant bits of the pixel representation of an image. This is a simple technique but the down side is that the message can be very susceptible to information loss. inserting an A into 3 of the pixels of a 24 bit image. Here is the original raster data: Consider an example that involves

(00100111 11101001 11001000) (00100111 11001000 11101001) (11001000 00100111 11101001) The binary value of A (ASCII 65) is 1000001 and encoding A into the last bits. 3 pixel sequence will change the above sequence to: (00100111 11101000 11001000) (00100110 11001000 11101000) (11001001 00100111 11101001) REQUIREMENTS OF STEGANOGRAPHY With some important terms defined, the requirements for steganography become easier to understand. One requirement is that the integrity of the message inside the stego-object must be maintained. This principle applies both while it is being embedded into the cover-object and after it has become a stego-object. The message must not be altered. The next requirement is that the stego-object must not be noticeably different from the cover-object so as to draw attention to the possibility of a hidden message. including visual and file size differences. With that final requirement in mind, it would seem imperative to bring up the fact that steganography is not the same as cryptography. As noted before, steganography is hiding a message so as not to be detected. Cryptography is encrypting a message, hidden or not so no one can determine the contents of the message. Therefore, cryptography and steganography This principle applies to any difference

compliment each other, making use of them both on a message a more effective means to accomplish the goals of both. Image files To a computer, an image is an array of numbers that represent light intensities at various points (pixels). These pixels make up the images raster data. A common image size is 640 X 480 pixels and 256 colors (or 8 bits per pixel). Such an image could contain about 300 kilobits of data. Digital images are typically stored in either 24-bit or 8-bit files. A 24-bit image provides the most space for hiding information; however, it can be quite large (with the exception of

JPEG images). All color variations for the pixels are derived from three primary colors: red, green, and blue. Each primary color is represented by 1 byte; 24-bit images use 3 bytes per pixel to represent a color value. These 3 bytes can be represented as hexadecimal, decimal, and binary values. In many Web pages, the background color is represented by a six-digit hexadecimal numberactually three pairs representing red, green, and blue. A white background would have the value FFFFFF: 100 percent red (FF), 100 percent green (FF), and 100 percent blue (FF). Its decimal value is 255, 255, 255, and its binary value is 11111111, 11111111, 11111111, which are the three bytes making up white. This definition of a white background is analogous to the color definition of a single pixel in an image. Pixel representation contributes to file size. For example, suppose we have a 24-bit image 1,024 pixels wide by 768 pixels higha common resolution for high-resolution graphics. Such an image has more than two million pixels, each having such a definition, which would produce a file exceeding 2 Mbytes. Encryption Conversion Mechanism in Steganography: The first step in embedding and hiding information is to pass both the secret message and the cover message into the encoder. Inside the encoder, one or several protocols will be

implemented to embed the secret information into the cover message. The type of protocol will depend on what information you are trying to embed and what you are embedding it in. Two files are required when one wishes to hide data inside of another file. The first file required is the image that will contain the hidden information this file is called the cover image. The second file required is the message file that contains the information that needs to be concealed

Encoding Process

Algorithm of the encoding process: Read the cover image and it is displayed in the screen. The pixel values of the image are stored in the pixel array. Read the embed file and this file is encrypted using RSA public key. Read the secret key (i.e., password). From the secret key pseudo random number is generated and that number is the starting index of the pixel array. Read a char from the file. If the eof is reached in the file, EOF char is embedded in the image file.

The picture, using the newly calculated the pixel values, is displayed

Decoding Process Algorithm of the decoding process: Read the stego image and store the pixel value in an array. Read the secret key. From the secret key a pseudo random number is generated that number is the starting index of the pixel array. If the eof is reached in the file, the string is decrypted using RSA private key. Display the recovered text.

Need of Steganography Internet users frequently need to store, send, or receive private information. The most common way to do this is to transform the data into a different form. The resulting data can be understood only who know its original form. This method of protecting information is known as encryption. A major drawback to encryption is that the existence of data is not hidden. Data that has been encrypted, although unreadable, still exists as data. If given enough time, someone

could eventually decrypt the data.

A solution to this problem is steganography.

Steganographys goal is to hide data well enough that unintended recipients do not suspect the medium of containing hidden data. Some of the mediums are image, audio and video Features When considering an image in which to hide information, first consider the image as well as the palette. Obviously, an image with large areas of solid colors is a poor choice of selecting the image. In the solid area the embedded message would be noticeable one. Once the cover image is selected then decide the appropriate technique to hide the information. There are some common techniques available for embedding the information such as Least Significant bit insertion, masking and filtering, and algorithms and transformations. In another approach, the information-hiding process in a steganographic system starts by identifying a cover mediums redundant bits (those that can be modified without destroying that mediums integrity). The embedding process creates a stego medium by replacing these

redundant bits with data from the hidden message. Even if hidden content is not revealed, the existence of it is: modifying the cover medium changes its statistical properties, so eavesdroppers can detect the distortions in the resulting stego mediums statistical properties. The process of finding these distortions is called statistical steganalysis. It discusses existing steganographic systems and presents recent research in detecting them via statistical steganalysis. Other surveys focus on the general usage of information hiding and watermarking or else provide an overview of detection algorithms. The one more type of research results shows that, data hiding is typically achieved by altering some nonessential information in the host message. For example, given a color image, the least-significant bit (LSB) of each pixel can be changed to embed the hidden secret. Two important uses of data hiding in digital media are to provide proof of the copyright, and assurance of content integrity. Therefore, the data should stay hidden in a host signal, even if that signal is subjected to manipulation as degrading as filtering, re-sampling, cropping, or lossy data compression.

Limitations Some limitations exist with using steganography though not too complex to overcome. First, the sender and receiver must agree on a method in which to hide the message. Otherwise, the receiver may never know they have a message since it is hidden. Another limitation is choosing the correct media for the message to be sent. The sender does not want to hide a large message in a format that cannot handle the message size without compromising the process. Also choosing the correct image is rather important. An image with very few color variations makes discretely inserting a message more difficult as the altered pixels would be visibly apparent. Making sure the method chosen to hide the message is another possible limitation and the sender must send the secret key for decoding the image. Uses of Steganography steganography can also be used for illegitimate reasons. For instance, if someone was trying to steal data, they could conceal it in another file or files and send it out in an innocent looking email or file transfer. Furthermore, a person with a hobby of saving data in their hard drive may choose to hide them through the use of steganography. And, as was pointed out in the concern for terroristic purposes. CONCLUSION In steganography, cryptography is strongly used for safe secret message transfer. The steganography holds fully encrypted information. Even if any hackers try to extract the message, they are not able to identify what the message is. Only the receiver who has the private key of RSA public key cryptosystem must know the correct information. When seeing the stego image no one can identify the hidden information. The stego image has no much

distortion/modification. In this stego image the no. of characters that can be embedded is equal to the size of the image 1. Efforts in devising more robust steganography are essential to ensure the survivability of embedded information such as copyright and licensing. It can be used as a form of secure communication between multiple parties.

FUTURE OF THE STEGNOGRAPHY: Steganography can be evolved into a digital strategy of hiding a file in the form of multimedia, such as an audio file and even a video file. Hiding information, where electronic media are used as such carriers, requires alterations of the media properties which may introduce some form of degradation. It can be done in audio files in the format of .wav files. While embedding information in sound file, it takes the advantages of a persons inability to hear low or soft sounds after the loud ones. MIDI files are heavily used for tones in mobile devices. The tones can be altered easily and only limited message can be efficiently hided in it. The information can also be efficiently hided in MP3 format which has the quality of audio without the degradation. The video file is stored as a series of images and audio in one file. This file can be used to encode messages in the images and the audio separately.

IMAGE PROCESSING STEGANOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUE

(TRANSMITTING SECRET MESSAGES)

PRESENTED BY

M.SILAMBHARASAN & V.VINOTH KUMAR 2ND YEAR DEPT. OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING MAHENDRA ENGINEERING COLLEGE