A Comparative Study of Recent Steganography Techniques for Multiple Image Formats
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I. J. Computer Network and Information Security, 2019, 1, 11-25 Published Online January 2019 in MECS (http://www.mecs-press.org/) DOI: 10.5815/ijcnis.2019.01.02 A Comparative Study of Recent Steganography Techniques for Multiple Image Formats Arshiya Sajid Ansari Noida International University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, NCR Delhi Noida, India E-mail: [email protected] Mohammad Sajid Mohammadi, Mohammad Tanvir Parvez Qassim University, Computer Engineering Department, Qassim, Saudi Arabia E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Received: 20 February 2018; Accepted: 12 November 2018; Published: 08 January 2019 Abstract—Steganography is the technique for image is a combination of cover image plus hidden data. exchanging concealed secret information in a way to This paper presents a survey of Steganography avoid suspicion. The aim of Steganography is to transfer algorithms based on various image formats. The paper is secrete message to another party by hiding the data in a organized as follows. Section I includes the introduction cover object, so that the imposter who monitors the and technical properties of Steganography, applications, traffic should not distinguish between genuine secret limitations, methods, and Steganalysis. Section II presents message and the cover object. This paper presents the Steganography cover image formats, their comparative study and performance analysis of different methods/techniques and color model information of each image Steganography methods using various types of image format. Section III describes the literature review cover media ((like BMP/JPEG/PNG etc.) with the of recent Steganography techniques. Section IV is devoted discussion of their file formats. We also discuss the to comparative analysis. Finally, we wrap up the embedding domains along with a discussion on salient discussion in Section V. technical properties, applications, limitations, and Steganalysis. Index Terms—Image Steganography, Steganography Embedding Domain, Steganography File Format. Shared key I. INTRODUCTION In today’s world, data security issue has got the top Cover Image priority as millions of users are frequently transmitting and receiving data. Steganography is a communication method to reduce the risk of attack during transmission Steganography Stego over communication media. Steganography was Algorithm Image introduced with the example of “Prisoner’s secret Data Image message” by Simmons in 1983 [10]. Mostly all type of files, like image, text, audio, and video can be used as carriers for the Steganography. However, the more Fig.1. An Example of Image Steganography. suitable medium are those with a high degree of redundancy; therefore the ideal format especially A. Applications and Limitations recommended are image and audio files. Text Steganography is very effective for hiding information Steganography is used very rarely because text file and can be used for a number of applications like social, consists of small amount of redundant data. Audio and scientific and governmental applications. However, as video are also more complex to use compared to images, always, every technology may also have some downsides. hence Image Steganography is the more popular choice Steganography can also be misused for unlawful for researchers for hiding information. The image, which activities; some constraints are also encountered in using is used to hide the secret message is called Cover-Image, Steganography. Following Table 1 shows some information or data that is getting encoded is called applications, while Table 2 shows some limitations of Hidden Data and the cover image encoded with hidden Steganography. data is called Stego image as shown in Fig. 1. Stego Copyright © 2019 MECS I.J. Computer Network and Information Security, 2019, 1, 11-25 12 A Comparative Study of Recent Steganography Techniques for Multiple Image Formats Steganalysis process is generally consists of six basic Table 1. Applications of Steganography Techniques. steps as shown in Fig. 3. Steganalysis senses suspected a. Steganography is useful to transfer the secret message object over the Internet to break the Steganography from source place to destination place. method. The pre-processing step may apply image b. Steganography is also used to store and to transfer the processing on the set of data images, for example, information of secret location. converting an image from color to greyscale or c. Steganography can be used for secure online voting. transformation or cropping or compression. d. It can be used for private banking. e. It can be used for the military purpose. 1.Select the Table 2. Limitations of Steganography Methods. Suspected object a. Terrorist for criminal activities can misuse it. To stop such illegal activities some governments have taken 6.Apply 2.Process some corrective actions to restrict Steganography and Classification the similar technologies. All these kind of technologies Object if are under high surveillance. required b. It can be misused by attackers to harm privacy concern for example in Film Industry (to plagiarise films), social media (to steal the personal information and pictures from WhatsApp Facebook Instagram etc.) Alternatively, software industry (for making pirated 5.Train the 3.Apply Feature software). Classifier Extraction Process B. Steganalysis 4.Select and Steganalysis is an art of breaking Steganography design the Classifier method to expose the existence of secreted information. Fig. 2. shows the example of Steganalysis process. Steganalysis has two approaches, one is ‘specific Fig.3. Basic technical steps in Steganalysis. Steganalysis' (specific for spatial domain or specific for JPEG) and the second one is ‘universal Steganalysis’ (for Steganalysis process also reduces dimensions of an all types of image format). It will not go through the image if required. The features should be rather different specific Steganalysis category over the Internet, because from the image without hidden message and for the one cannot judge which type of format is being used by stego-image. The larger the difference, the better the the transmitter. In specific Steganalysis approach, the features are. The features should be as general as possible, embedding method is already known; whereas universal i.e. they are effective to all different types of images and Steganalysis approach is not aware of any prior different data hiding schemes. Feature extraction, knowledge about the embedding method [32]. classifier design is another key issue for Steganalysis and Steganalysis can also be used to measure the robustness the performance of a Steganalysis system. Combination of Steganography method. [30]. Several Steganalysis of feature extraction and classifier design is evaluated by approaches are presented by researchers in [33 – 38, 42]. its classification success or error rate. [50]. Selection and design of the classifier are performed, based on extracted features. Steganalysis train the classifier according to the format required. In Steganalysis, classification is used to classify the set of the data object into the original data object and stego object. Some open source Steganalysis Suspected tools available are StegSecret, OpenPuff, StegDetect, Object StegBreak, StegSpy, Hiderman, Jsteg-shell, Jsteg-shell, JPhide and Seek, Camouflage, F5, Steganography Cover Secret Feature Extraction Object Object Analyzer Real-Time, JPHide, JPegX, StegExpose. Process Classifier II. STEGANOGRAPHY COVER IMAGE FORMATS This section presents the discussion on various Secret Object Cover Object Steganography image file formats, their color models and Statistics Statistics TV FV different steganography methods / techniques used for TV FV TV FV various formats. TV TV FV FV TV FV All the image formats consists of dissimilar TV FV characteristics, all contain different header information. The core difference between them is the amount of compression. For example, 24 bit RGB color image Fig.2. Illustration of the process of Steganalysis. Copyright © 2019 MECS I.J. Computer Network and Information Security, 2019, 1, 11-25 A Comparative Study of Recent Steganography Techniques for Multiple Image Formats 13 needs 9.6 megabytes storage if no compression is used. which forms the part of the lossy level; and the second However, it requires much lesser space with compression. level is the Huffman coding that is a lossless data Finer details of image necessitates less compression, compression technique. JPEG image data embedding while more ratio of compression sacrifices the finer methods store secret data between these two phases [4]. details. JPEG uses lossy compression, while Bitmap, DCT transformed cosine values cannot be back- PNG and TIFF images have lossless compression calculated exactly and repeated calculation using limited property. precision number produces a rounding error hence, it is called lossy compression. A. JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) B. BMP (Bitmap)/RGB JPEG is one of the most commonly used image file formats. It is most widely used in digital cameras, BMP format offers compressed and uncompressed memory cards, web pages, and image processing because images file format in greyscale as well as in color mode. JPEG format can compresses the image data into smaller It also supports optional transparency. 8 bit Bitmap has a file size and has low risk of attacks. JPEG uses lossy maximum of 256 colors per pixel. RGB is also available compression, which is a strong downside of it also. The in 16 bits,