72 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,

Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2010

Comprehensive Analysis and Enhancement of

Steganographic Strategies for Multimedia Data
Hiding and Authentication
Ali Javed, Asim Shahzad, Romana shahzadi, Fahad Khan

Faculty of Telecommunication and Information Engineering

University of Engineering and Technology Taxila Pakistan
ali.javed@uettaxila.edu.pk, asim.shahzad@uettaxila.edu.pk, fahad.khan@uettaxila.edu.pk

Abstract: This research paper focuses on the analysis and popular formulation of the problem: two prisoners, Alice
enhancement of steganographic strategies for multimedia data and Bob[2], wish to plan an escape from jail.
hiding authentication. Based on an authentication game
between an image and its authorized receiver, and an opponent,
security of authentication watermarking is measured by the
opponent's inability to launch a successful attack. In this work,
we consider two stages of data hiding mechanism: Hiding the
data in an image along with conditional security and detecting
the hidden data. First we detect whether there exists a hidden
message within the image and then applying the conditional
security mechanism, we extract that hidden message. We
propose a novel security enhancement strategy that results in
efficient and secure LSB-based embedding and verification
phenomenon. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results
are presented. They show that using our approach, protection is
achieved without significant increase in image size and color Figure 1. Stenography Process
distortion, and without sacrificing the image or video quality.
However, the prison warden, Ward, can monitor any
Keywords: Steganography, LSB, Stego image, Stego key, communication between Alice and Bob, and if he detects
payload, Watermarking, Covert Communication any hint of “unusual" communications, he throws them both
in solitary confinement. Alice and Bob must then transmit
1. Introduction their secret plans so that nothing in their communication
seems unusual" to Ward. There have been many proposed
The word steganography literally means covered writing as solutions to this problem, ranging from rudimentary
derived from Greek. It includes a vast array of methods of schemes using invisible ink to a protocol which is provably
secret communications that conceal the very existence of the secure assuming that one-way functions exist.
message. Among these methods are invisible inks,
microdots, character arrangement (other than the
cryptographic methods of permutation and substitution),
digital signatures, covert Channels and spread-spectrum
communications. Steganography is the art of concealing the
existence of information within seemingly inoffensive
carriers. Steganography can be viewed as parallel to
cryptography. Both have been used throughout recorded
history as means to protect information. At times these two
technologies seem to converge while the objectives of the
two differ. Cryptographic techniques "scramble" messages
so if intercepted, the messages cannot be understood.
Steganography, in an essence, "camouflages" a message to
hide its existence and make it seem "invisible" thus
concealing the fact that a message is being sent altogether.
Figure 2. General Model of Steganography
An encrypted message may draw suspicion while invisible
messages will not [1]. Steganography refers to the problem
of sending messages hidden in “innocent looking" 2. Literature Survey
communications over a public channel so that an adversary
eavesdropping on the channel cannot even detect the 2.1 Steganography Techniques
presence of the hidden messages. Simmons gave the most 2.1.1 Physical steganography
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Steganography has been widely used including recent • Concealing messages within the lowest bits of noisy
historical times and the present day. Possible permutations images or sound files.
are endless and known examples include • Concealing data within encrypted data. The data to be
•Hidden messages within wax tablets: in ancient Greece, concealed is first encrypted before being used to overwrite
people wrote messages on the wood, and then covered it part of a much larger block of encrypted data.
with wax upon which an innocent covering message was • Chaffing and winnowing.
written. • Mimic functions convert one file to have the statistical
• Hidden messages on messenger's body: also in ancient profile of another. This can thwart statistical methods that
Greece. Herodotus tells the story of a message tattooed on a help brute-force attacks identify the right solution in a
slave's shaved head, hidden by the growth of his hair, and ciphertext-only attack.
exposed by shaving his head again. The message allegedly • Concealed messages in tampered executable files,
carried a warning to Greece about Persian invasion plans. exploiting redundancy in the i386 instruction set.
This method has obvious drawbacks such as delayed • Pictures embedded in video material (optionally played at
transmission while waiting for the slave's hair to grow, and slower or faster speed).
its one-off use since additional messages requires additional • Injecting imperceptible delays to packets sent over the
slaves. In WWII, the French Resistance sent some messages network from the keyboard. Delays in key presses in some
written on the backs of couriers using invisible ink. applications (telnet or remote desktop software) can mean a
• Hidden messages on paper written in secret inks, under delay in packets, and the delays in the packets can be used to
other messages or on the blank parts of other messages. encode data.
• Messages written in morse code on knitting yarn and then •Content-Aware Steganography hides information in the
knitted into a piece of clothing worn by a courier. semantics a human user assigns to a datagram. These
• Messages written on the back of postage stamps. systems offer security against a non-human
adversary/warden.
2.1.2 Digital steganography
•Blog-Steganography. Messages are fractionalized and the
Modern steganography entered the world in 1985 with the advent
of the personal computer applied to classical steganography (encrypted) pieces are added as comments of orphaned web-
problems. Development following that was slow, but has since logs (or pin boards on social network platforms). In this case
taken off, going by the number of 'stego' programs available: Over the selection of blogs is the symmetric key that sender and
725 digital steganography applications have been identified by the recipient are using; the carrier of the hidden message is the
Steganography Analysis and Research Center. whole blogosphere.

2.2 Types of Steganography

Pure Steganography
Pure steganography is where you only need to know the
technique to be able to read off the message.
Private Steganography
Private Steganography requires you to know a password as
well as the technique.
Public steganography
Public steganography is like public key cryptography - you
have a public and private key and knowledge of the
technique. A standard library for pure steganography isn't so
Figure 3. Cover Image smart - because it would allow people to simply try the
Here a cover Image of a tree is shown in fig. 3. By removing techniques.
all but the last 2 bits of each color component, an almost
completely black image results. Making the resulting image 2.3 Image Steganography
85 times brighter results in the image below. Steganography is the art of hiding the fact that
communication is taking place, by hiding information in
other information. Many different carrier file formats can be
used, but digital images are the most popular because of
their frequency on the Internet.
For hiding secret information in images, there exist a large
variety of steganographic techniques some are more
complex than others and all of them have respective strong
and weak points.
As stated earlier, 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
Figure 4. Stego Image specific applications. For these different image file formats,
different steganographic algorithms exist.
Digital steganography techniques include:
2.4 Image Compression
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When working with larger images of greater bit depth, the 3.1 Proposed Main Flow Diagram
images tend to become too large to transmit over a standard
Internet connection. In order to display an image in a The proposed methodology in this work is to embed the
reasonable amount of time, techniques must be incorporated stego message into image and video using LSB Technique.
to reduce the image’s file size. These techniques make use
of mathematical formulas to analyze and condense image
data, resulting in smaller file sizes. This process is called
compression. In images there are two types of compression,
Lossy and Lossless. Both methods save storage space, but
the procedures that they implement differ. Lossy
compression creates smaller files by discarding excess image
data from the original image. It removes details that are too
small for the human eye to differentiate, resulting in close
approximations of the original image, although not an exact
duplicate. An example of an image format that uses this
compression technique is JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts
Group). Lossless compression, on the other hand, never
removes any information from the original image, but
instead represents data in mathematical formulas. The Figure 5. Main Flow Diagram
original image’s integrity is maintained and the
decompressed image output is bit-by-bit identical to the
original image input. The most popular image formats that 3.2 Text in Image Flow Diagram
use lossless compression is GIF (Graphical Interchange
Format) and 8-bit BMP (a Microsoft Windows bitmap file).

2.5 Video Steganography

Since a video can be viewed as a sequence of still images,
video steganography can be viewed simply as an extension
of image steganography. The internet and the World Wide
Web have revolutionaries the way in which digital data is
distributed. The widespread and easy access to multimedia
content has motivated development of technologies for
digital steganography or data hiding, with emphasis on
access control, authentication, and copyright protection.
Steganography deals with information hiding, as opposed to
encryption. Much of the recent work in data hiding is about
copyright protection of multimedia data. This is also
referred to as digital watermarking. Digital watermarking
for copyright protection typically requires very few bits, of
the order of 1% or less of the host data size. These
watermarks could be alpha-numeric characters, or could be
multimedia data as well.
One of the main objectives of this watermarking is to be able
to identify the rightful owners by authenticating the
watermarks. As such, it is desirable that the methods of
embedding and extracting digital watermarks are resistant
to typical signal processing operations, such as compression,
and intentional attacks to remove the watermarks.
While transparent or visible watermarks are acceptable in
many cases, hidden data for control or secure
communication need to be perceptually invisible. The
signature message data is the data that we would like to
embed or conceal. The source data is used to hide the Figure 7. Text in Image flow Diagram
signature data; we often refer to the source as the host data.
After embedding a signature in to a host, we get the 3.3 Image in Image Flow diagram
watermarked or embedded data. The recovered data, also
referred to as the reconstructed data, is the signature that is
extracted from the embedded data. [11]

3. Proposed Methodology
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3.5 LSB Technique

The most widely used technique to hide data is the usage of
the LSB- Least Significant Bit technique. Least Significant
Bit insertion method is a simple approach to embed
information in a cover file [11]. The LSB is the lowest order
bit in a binary value. This is an important concept in
computer data storage and programming that applies to the
order in which data are organized, stored or transmitted
[12]. Usually, three bits from each pixel can be stored to
hide an image in the LSBs of each byte of a 24-bit image.
Consequently, LSB requires that only half of the bits in an
image be changed when data can be hidden in least and
second least significant bits and yet the resulting stego-
image which will be displayed is indistinguishable to the
cover image to the human visual system [11].
When using a 24-bit image, a bit of each of the red, green
and blue color 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 [13]. For
example a grid for 3 pixels of a 24-bit image can be as
follows:
Figure 7. Image in Image flow Diagram (00101101 00011100 11011100)
(10100110 11000100 00001100)
(11010010 10101101 01100011)
3.4 Text in Video Flow Diagram
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 00011101 11011100)

(10100110 11000101 00001100)
(11010010 10101100 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 [13]. Since
there are 256 possible intensities of each primary color,
changing the LSB of a pixel results in small changes in the
intensity of the colors. 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 the above example, consecutive bytes of the image data –
from the first byte to the end of the message – are used to
embed the information. This approach is very easy to detect
[14]. A slightly more secure system is for the sender and
receiver to share a secret key that specifies only certain
pixels to be changed. Should an adversary suspect that LSB
steganography has been used, he has no way of knowing
which pixels to target without the secret key [15].
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
Figure 8. Text in Video Flow Diagram very large cover image.
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3.6 Implementation of LSB Technique nothing has changed in the appearance of the image.
Nevertheless, even in case wherein all LSB’s are changed;
To illustrate implementation of LSB technique, consider the
most images would still retain their original appearance
following image of parrots showing true colors Palette of the
because of the fact that the LSB’s represent a very minute
Image
portion (roughly 1/255 or 0.39%) of the whole image. The
resulting difference between the new from the original color
value is called the embedding error. Since there are only
three LSB’s for each pixel, the total number of bits that can
be hidden is only three times the total number of pixels
having the dimensions 768x512.

4. Simulation and Results

Following images were taken and processed by the
application of Digital Steganography and the results are as
following:
Figure 9. Parrot (True Color Palette Image)
This image is composed of red, green, and blue color 4.1 Procedure for Text in Image hiding
channels. The pixel at the top-left corner of the picture has The procedure is started with opening the image in which
the values 122, 119, and 92 for its red, green, and blue color you want to hide the data and then enter the stego message
components respectively. In binary, these values may be in the specified space. The image is shown in fig.11and the
written as: stego message is shown in the text box.
01111010 01110111 01011100

Figure 11. Open Image

The stego message is then merged into the original image as

shown in fig. 12.

Figure 10. Red, Green and Blue color channels of Parrot

Image

To hide the character “a” in the image, the LSB (the

rightmost bit) of each of the three 8-bit color values above
will be replaced with the bits that form the binary equivalent
of the character “a” (i.e., 01100001). This replacement
operation is generally called embedding. After embedding,
the color value would now change to:
01111010 1110111 01011101
Since there are only three values, only three of the eight bits
of the character “a” can fit on this pixel. Therefore the Figure 12. Merge Text
succeeding pixels of this image will also be used. In the
three color values shown above, only the last value actually The stego message is detected on the receiving end as shown
changed as a result of LSB encoding, which means almost in fig. 13.
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In this phase the stego message is also image. The image of

a cat in fig. 16 is a stego image in this case and the image of
a mountain on the left is the original image in which the
stego image will be embedded.

Figure 13. Detect

The stego message is finally extracted as shown in the text Figure 16. Open Images
box in fig. 14
For merging the stego image in the original image user has
to enter the password and then the stego image embeds into
the original image.

Figure 14. Extract

The difference between the original image and the image

after insertion of stego message is shown in fig. 15. The two Figure 17. Merge Image
images look exactly the same which is why image
steganography is so important and useful in hiding data or On the receiving end the stego image can be recovered by
sending secret messages entering the password as shown in fig. 18.

Figure 18. Enter Password

Figure 15. View Difference
The stego image is finally extracted after entering the
password as shown in fig. 19
4.2 Procedure for Image in Image stenography
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Figure 19. Extract Image

The difference between the original image and the image Figure 22. View Frames
after insertion of stego message is shown in fig. 20. The two
images look exactly the same. The stego text is added to be embedded in the video as
shown in fig. 23

Figure 20. View Difference

4.3 Procedure for Text in Video stenography

Figure 23. Add Text
In this phase the stego message is embedded in the video, as
you can see in fig. 21 the video is added to enter the stego The stego text is detected as shown in fig. 24
message.

Figure 24. Detect text

Figure 21. Add Video
The frames can be viewed in the fig. 22 Finally the stego data is extracted on the receiving end as
shown in fig. 25
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Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2010

2nd Information Hiding Workshop, April 1998

[11] N. F. Johnson, S. Jajodia, “Exploring Steganography: Seeing
the Unseen,” IEEE Computer, February 1998, pp.26-34.
[12] Julie K. Petersen, The Telecommunications Illustrated
Dictionary, CRC Press, 2002, ISBN: 084931173X.
[13] Krenn, R., “Steganography and Steganalysis”.
[14] Wang, H & Wang, S, “Cyber warfare: Steganography vs.
Steganalysis”, Communications of the ACM, 47:10, October
2004
[15] Anderson, R.J. & Petitcolas, F.A.P., “On the limits of
steganography”, IEEE Journal of selected Areas in
Communications, May 1998
[16] E. Kawaguchi and R. O. Eason :"Principle and applications of
BPCS-Steganography", Proceedings of SPIE: Multimedia
Systems and Applications, Vol.3528, pp.464-463, 1998.

Figure 25. Extract

Author Profile
5. Conclusion
Thus we conclude that steganographic techniques can be Engr. Ali Javed is serving as a Lecturer in
Software Engineering Department at
used for a number of purposes along with the covert
University of Engineering & Technology
communication or deniable data storage, Confidential Taxila, Pakistan since September, 2007.
communication, Protection of data alteration, Secret data He has received his MS degree in Computer
storing, Media Database systems, Copyright Protection, Engineering from the University of
Feature Tagging and perhaps most importantly digital Engineering & Technology Taxila, Pakistan
watermarking. A digital watermark is invisible to the eye, in January, 2010. He has received B.Sc. degree in Software
undetectable without the appropriate secret key, but contains Engineering from University of Engineering & Technology Taxila,
small ownership identification. A much wider field of Pakistan, in September, 2007. His areas of interest are Digital
steganography is digital Steganography allows copyright Image Processing, Computer vision, Video Summarization,
Machine Learning, Software Design and Software testing.
owners to incorporate into their work identifying
information invisible to human eye, yet protecting against
the dangers of copyright infringement.

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