Extracting hidden messages in steganographic images

Journal Article · Thu Jul 17 00:00:00 EDT 2014 · Digital Investigation

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2014.05.003· OSTI ID:1142884

Quach, Tu-Thach ^[1]

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1. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

The eventual goal of steganalytic forensic is to extract the hidden messages embedded in steganographic images. A promising technique that addresses this problem partially is steganographic payload location, an approach to reveal the message bits, but not their logical order. It works by finding modified pixels, or residuals, as an artifact of the embedding process. This technique is successful against simple least-significant bit steganography and group-parity steganography. The actual messages, however, remain hidden as no logical order can be inferred from the located payload. This paper establishes an important result addressing this shortcoming: we show that the expected mean residuals contain enough information to logically order the located payload provided that the size of the payload in each stego image is not fixed. The located payload can be ordered as prescribed by the mean residuals to obtain the hidden messages without knowledge of the embedding key, exposing the vulnerability of these embedding algorithms. We provide experimental results to support our analysis.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1142884
• Report Number(s): SAND2014-3467J; PII: S1742287614000462
• Journal Information: Digital Investigation, Vol. 11, Issue S2; ISSN 1742-2876
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
Steganography
Steganalysis
Payload location
Message extraction
Embedding key
Logical order