Information Hiding: Steganography And Watermarking-attacks And Countermeasures: Steganography And Watermarking - Attacks And Countermeasures (advances In Information Security)

Springer, 2001. — 148 p. Steganography (literally, covered writing) is the hiding of secret messages within another seemingly innocuous message, or carrier. The carrier can be anything used to transfer information, including, for example, wood or slate tablets, hollow heels, images under stamps, tiny photographs, or word arrangements. Digital carriers include e-mail, audio, and video messages, disk space, disk partitions, and images. Steganography, like cryptography, is a means of providing secrecy. Yet steganography does so by hiding the very existence of the communication, while cryptography does so by scrambling a message so it cannot be understood. A cryptographic message can be intercepted by an eavesdropper, but the eavesdropper may not even know a steganographic message exists. Digital watermarking addresses issues related to intellectual property and copyright protection. Digital watermarks can be thought of as commercial applications of steganography and may be used to trace, identify, and locate digital media across networks. Digital watermarks are attributes of the carrier, as a watermark typically includes information about the carrier or the owner. The goal of steganography is to avoid drawing suspicion to the transmission of a secret message. Detecting the secret message-an attack against steganography-relies on the fact that hiding information in digital media alters the carriers and introduces unusual characteristics or some form of degradation to the carrier. The characteristics introduced by the embedded data may be the key to such an attack. A successful attack against a digital watermark, on the other hand, renders the watermark useless or unreadable. In general, attacks against embedded data can include various combinations of cryptanalysis, steganalysis, image processing techniques, or other attempts to overwrite or remove the embedded information. These attacks may reveal a steganographic message or confuse a watermark reader as to the authenticity of the watermark. Based on the understanding of the impact data embedding has on carriers and the corresponding attacks, countermeasures can be devised to aid in the survivability of the embedded information. This monograph presents the research contributions in three fundamental areas with respect to image-based steganography and watermarking: analysis of data hiding techniques, attacks against hidden information, and countermeasures to attacks against digital watermarks. Analysis of data hiding techniques involves investigating available tools and techniques for hiding information, classifying these techniques, and understanding the impact steganography software has on various carriers. Introduction Exploring Steganography Steganalysis: Attacks against Hidden Data Countermeasures to Attacks A: Hiding Data in Network Traffic B: Glossary of Methods to Distort Stego-Images Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures deals with information hiding. With the proliferation of multimedia on the Internet, information hiding addresses two areas of concern: privacy of information from surveillance (steganography) and protection of intellectual property (digital watermarking). Steganography (literally, covered writing) explores methods to hide the existence of hidden messages. These methods include invisible ink, microdot, digital signature, covert channel, and spread spectrum communication. Digital watermarks represent a commercial application of steganography. Watermarks can be used to track the copyright and ownership of electronic media. In this volume, the authors focus on techniques for hiding information in digital media. They analyze the hiding techniques to uncover their limitations. These limitations are employed to devise attacks against hidden information. The goal of these attacks is to expose the existence of a secret message or render a digital watermark unusable. In assessing these attacks, countermeasures are developed to assist in protecting digital watermarking systems. Understanding the limitations of the current methods will lead us to build more robust methods that can survive various manipulation and attacks. The more information that is placed in the public's reach on the Internet, the more owners of such information need to protect themselves from theft and false representation. Systems to analyze techniques for uncovering hidden information and recover seemingly destroyed information will be useful to law enforcement authorities in computer forensics and digital traffic analysis. Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures presents the authors' research contributions in three fundamental areas with respect to image-based steganography and watermarking: analysis of data hiding techniques, attacks against hidden information, and countermeasures to attacks against digital watermarks. Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking &endash; Attacks and Countermeasures is suitable for a secondary text in a graduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.