This document discusses steganography techniques for hiding secret information in digital images. It begins with an introduction to steganography and its differences from cryptography. It then discusses various steganography techniques including least significant bit insertion, masking and filtering, and transform domain techniques. It also discusses using bitmap images for steganography and the popularity of formats like JPEG. The goal of the document is to provide an overview of digital image steganography techniques.
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Discusses the importance of steganography in securing information in digital media and the growth of information hiding techniques due to network security needs.
Introduces the project team working on steganography, including members and project name.
Defines steganography, contrasts it with cryptography, and presents historical examples of its use in secret communication.
Describes the steganography system design focusing on hiding information in images, including functionality, software, and limitations.
Explains the foundational concepts of steganography, including its components: carrier, message, and password, for secured data transmission.
Contrasts steganography with cryptography and watermarking, highlighting invisibility, robustness, and security features.
Outlines various steganography techniques, including LSB, masking, filtering, and their applications in multimedia objects.
Focuses on using bitmap images for steganography, detailing the structural approach and how LSB carries hidden information.
Describes the system architecture for steganography, focusing on encryption and decryption module functionalities.
Illustrates the processes involved in the encryption and decryption phases within the steganography application.
Presents the coding structure and techniques used in the software for performing encryption and decryption operations.
Provides a step-by-step guide for users to encrypt and decrypt files using the steganography application.
Summarizes the significance of steganography in secure communication, project achievements and future applications.
Lists the resources used in the project, including websites, books, and provides a glossary of relevant terms.
CHAPTER- 1
INTRODUCTION
One ofthe reasons that intruders can be successful is the most of the information they
acquire from a system is in a form that they can read and comprehend. Intruders may
reveal the information to others, modify it to misrepresent an individual or
organization, or use it to launch an attack. One solution to this problem is, through the
use of steganography. Steganography is a technique of hiding information in digital
media. In contrast to cryptography, it is not to keep others from knowing the hidden
information but it is to keep others from thinking that the information even exists.
Steganography become more important as more people join the cyberspace revolution.
Steganography is the art of concealing information in ways that prevents the detection
of hidden messages. Stegranography include an array of secret communication
methods that hide the message from being seen or discovered.
Due to advances in ICT, most of information is kept electronically. Consequently, the
security of information has become a fundamental issue. Besides cryptography,
streganography can be employed to secure information. In cryptography, the message
or encrypted message is embedded in a digital host before passing it through the
network, thus the existence of the message is unknown. Besides hiding data for
confidentiality, this approach of information hiding can be extended to copyright
protection for digital media: audio, video and images.
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The growing possibilitiesof modern communications need the special means of
security especially on computer network. The network security is becoming more
important as the number of data being exchanged on the internet increases. Therefore,
the confidentiality and data integrity are requires to protect against unauthorized
access and use. This has resulted in an explosive growth of the field of information
hiding
Information hiding is an emerging research area, which encompasses applications such
as copyright protection for digital media, watermarking, fingerprinting, and
steganography.
In watermarking applications, the message contains information such as owner
identification and a digital time stamp, which usually applied for copyright protection.
Fingerprint, the owner of the data set embeds a serial number that uniquely
identifies the user of the data set. This adds to copyright information to makes it
possible to trace any unauthorized used of the data set back to the user.
Steganography hide the secrete message within the host data set and presence
imperceptible and is to be reliably communicated to a receiver. The host data set is
purposely corrupted, but in a covert way, designed to be invisible to an information
analysis.
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What is Steganography?
Steganographyis the practice of hiding private or sensitive information within
something that appears to be nothing out to the usual. Steganography is often confused
with cryptology because the two are similar in the way that they both are used to
protect important information. The difference between two is that steganography
involves hiding information so it appears that no information is hidden at all. If a
person or persons views the object that the information is hidden inside of he or she
will have no idea that there is any hidden information, therefore the person will not
attempt to decrypt the information.
What steganography essentially does is exploit human perception, human senses are
not trained to look for files that have information inside of them, although this software
is available that can do what is called Steganography. The most common use of
steganography is to hide a file inside another file.
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History of Steganography:
Throughout history Steganography has been used to secretly communicate information
between people.
Some examples of use of Steganography is past times are:
1. During World War 2 invisible ink was used to write information on pieces of
paper so that the paper appeared to the average person as just being blank pieces
of paper. Liquids such as milk, vinegar and fruit juices were used, because when
each one of these substances are heated they darken and become visible to the
human eye.
2. In Ancient Greece they used to select messengers and shave their head, they
would then write a message on their head. Once the message had been written
the hair was allowed to grow back. After the hair grew back the messenger was
sent to deliver the message, the recipient would shave off the messengers hair to
see the secrete message.
3. Another method used in Greece was where someone would peel wax off a tablet
that was
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Why This Steganography?
Thistechnique is chosen, because this system includes not only imperceptibility but
also un-delectability by any steganolysis tool.
Project Scope:
This project is developed for hiding information in any image file. The scope of the
project is implementation of steganography tools for hiding information includes any
type of information file and image files and the path where the user wants to save
Image and extruded file.
Methodology:
User needs to run the application. The user has two tab options – encrypt and decrypt.
If user select encrypt, application give the screen to select image file, information file
and option to save the image file. If user select decrypt, application gives the screen to
select only image file and ask path where user want to save the secrete file.
This project has two methods – Encrypt and Decrypt.
In encryption the secrete information is hiding in with any type of image file.
Decryption is getting the secrete information from image file.
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Software Requirements:
• .NETFramework 3.5
Hardware Requirements:
Processor: Preferably 1.0 GHz or Greater.
RAM : 512 MB or Greater.
Limitations of the Software:
This project has an assumption that is both the sender and receiver must have shared
some secret information before imprisonment. Pure steganography means that there is
none prior information shared by two communication parties.
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Detecting Steganography:
The artof detecting Steganography is referred to as Steganalysis.
To put is simply Steganalysis involves detecting the use of Steganography inside of a
file. Steganalysis does not deal with trying to decrypt the hidden information inside of a
file, just discovering it.
There are many methods that can be used to detect Steganography such as:
“Viewing the file and comparing it to another copy of the file found on the Internet
(Picture file). There are usually multiple copies of images on the internet, so you may
want to look for several of them and try and compare the suspect file to them. For
example if you download a JPED and your suspect file is also a JPED and the two files
look almost identical apart from the fact that one is larger than the other, it is most
probable you suspect file has hidden information inside of it.
Future Enhancements:
To make it pure steganography application.
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CHAPTER-3
Problem Statement:
The formerconsists of linguistic or language forms of hidden writing. The later, such as
invisible ink, try of hide messages physically. One disadvantage of linguistic
steganography is that users must equip themselves to have a good knowledge of
linguistry. In recent years, everything is trending toward digitization. And with the
development of the internet technology, digital media can be transmitted conveniently
over the network. Therefore, messages can be secretly carried by digital media by using
the steganography techniques, and then be transmitted through the internet rapidly
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 exists a large variety of steganography
techniques some are more complex than others and all of them have respective strong
and weak points.
So we prepare this application, to make the information hiding more simple and user
friendly.
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Objective
The goal ofsteganography is covert communication. So, a fundamental requirement of
this steganography system is that the hider message carried by stego-media should not
be sensible to human beings.
The other goad of steganography is to avoid drawing suspicion to the existence of a
hidden message. This approach of information hiding technique has recently became
important in a number of application area
This project has following objectives:
• To product security tool based on steganography techniques.
• To explore techniques of hiding data using encryption module of this project
• To extract techniques of getting secret data using decryption module.
Steganography sometimes is used when encryption is not permitted. Or, more
commonly, steganography is used to supplement encryption. An encrypted file may
still hide information using steganography, so even if the encrypted file is deciphered,
the hidden message is not seen
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Overview
The word steganographycomes from the Greek “Seganos”, which mean covered or
secret and – “graphy” mean writing or drawing. Therefore, steganography mean,
literally, covered writing. It is the art and science of hiding information such its
presence cannot be detected and a communication is happening. A secrete information
is encoding in a manner such that the very existence of the information is concealed.
Paired with existing communication methods, steganography can be used to carry out
hidden exchanges.
The main goal of this projects it to communicate securely in a completely undetectable
manner and to avoid drawing suspicion to the transmission of a hider data. There has
been a rapid growth of interest in steganography for two reasons:
The publishing and broadcasting industries have become interested in techniques for
hiding encrypted copyright marks and serial numbers in digital films, audio recordings,
books and multimedia products
Moves by various governments to restrict the availability of encryption services have
motivated people to study methods by which private messages can be embedded in
seemingly innocuous cover messages.
The basic model of steganography consists of Carrier, Message and password. Carrier is
also known as cover-object, which the message is embedded and serves to hide the
presence of the message.
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Basically, the modelfor steganography is shown on following figure:
Fig - 1
Message is the data that the sender wishes to remain it confidential. It can be plain text,
ciphertext, other image, or anything that can be embedded in a bit stream such as a
copyright mark, a covert communication, or a serial number. Password is known as
stego-key, which ensures that only recipient who know the corresponding decoding key
will be able to extract the message from a cover-object. The cover-object with the secretly
embedded message is then called the Stego-object.
Recovering message from a stego-object requires the cover-object itselt and a
corresponding decoding key if a stego-key was used during the encoding process. The
original image may or may not be required in most applications to extract the message.
There are several suitable carriers below to be the cover-object:
• Network protocols such as TCP, IP and UDP
• Audio that using digital audio formats such as wav, midi, avi, mpeg, mpi
and voc
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Cover-object,
C
Message, M
Stego-key, K
F(X,M,K)
Stego Object, Z
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• File andDisk that can hides and append files by using the slack space
• Text such as null characters, just alike morse code including html and java
• Images file such as bmp, gif and jpg, where they can be both color and
gray-scale.
In general, the information hiding process extracts redundant bits from cover-object. The
process consists of two steps:
• Identification of redundant bits in a cover-object. Redundant bits are those
bits that can be modified without corrupting the quality or destroying the
integrity of the cover-object.
• Embedding process then selects the subset of the redundant bits to be
replaced with data from a secret message. The stego-object is created by
replacing the selected redundant bits with message bits
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CHAPTER-4
Literature Review
Steganography vsCryptography:
Basically, the purpose of cryptography and steganography is to provide secret
communication. However, steganography is not the same as cryptography.
Cryptography hides the contents of a secrete message from a malicious people, whereas
steganography even conceal the existence of the message. In cryptography, the system
is broken when the attacker can read the secret message. Breaking a steganography
system need the attacker to detect that steganography has been used.
It is possible to combine the techniques by encrypting message using cryptography and
then hiding the encrypted message using steganography. The resulting stego-image can
be transmitted without revealing that secret information is being exchanged.
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Steganography vs Watermarking:
Steganographypay attention to the degree of Invisibility while watermarking pay most
of its attribute to the robustness of the message and its ability to withstand attacks of
removal, such as image operations(rotation, cropping, filtering), audio
operations(rerecording, filtering)in the case of images and audio files being
watermarked respectively.
It is a non-questionable fact that delectability of a vessel with an introduced data
(steganographic message or a watermark) is a function of the changeability function of
the algorithm over the vessel.
Fig - 2
That is the way the algorithm changes the vessel and the severity of such an operation
determines with no doubt the delectability of the message, since delectability is a
function of file characteristics deviation from the norm, embedding operation attitude
and change severity of such change decides vessel file delectability.
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Invisibility
Robustness
Security
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A typical triangleof conflict is message Invisibility, Robustness, and Security.
Invisibility is a measure of the in notability of the contents of the message within the
vessel.
Security is sinominous to the cryptographic idea to message security, meaning inability
of reconstruction of the message without the proper secret key material shared.
Robustness refers to the endurance capability of the message to survive distortion or
removal attacks intact. It is often used in the watermarking field since watermarking
seeks the persistence of the watermark over attacks, steganographic messages on the
other hand tend to be of high sensitivity to such attacks. The more invisible the message
is the less secure it is (cryptography needs space) and the less robust it is (no error
checking/recovery introduced).The more robust the message is embedded the more
size it requires and the more visible it is.
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Steganography Techniques:
Over thepast few years, numerous steganography techniques that embed hidden
messages in multimedia objects have been proposed. There have been many techniques
for hiding information or messages in images in such a manner that alteration made to
the image is perceptually indiscernible. Commonly approaches are include LSB,
Masking and filtering and Transform techniques.
Least significant bit (LSB) insertion is a simple approach to embedding information in
image file. The simplest steganography techniques embed the bits of the message
directly into least significant bit plane of the cover-image in a
deterministic sequence. Modulating the least significant bit does not result in human
perceptible difference because the amplitude of the change is small. In this technique,
the embedding capacity can be increased by using two or more least significant bits. At
the same time, not only the risk of making the embedded message statistically
detectable increase but also the image fidelity degrades. Hence a variable size LSB
embedding schema is presented, in which the number of LSBs used for message
embedding/extracting depends on the local characteristics of the pixel. The advantage
of LSB-based method is easy to implement and high message pay-load.
Although LSB hides the message in such way that the humans do not perceive it, it is
still possible for the opponent to retrieve the message due to the simplicity of the
technique. Therefore, malicious people can easily try to extract the message from the
beginning of the image if they are suspicious that there exists secret information that
was embedded in the image.
Therefore, a system named Secure Information Hiding System (SIHS) is proposed to
improve the LSB scheme. It overcomes the sequence-mapping problem by embedding
the massage into a set of random pixels, which are scattered on the cover-image.
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Masking and filteringtechniques, usually restricted to 24 bits and gray scale image,
hide information by marking an image, in a manner similar to paper watermarks. The
technique perform analysis of the image, thus embed the information in significant
areas so that the hidden message is more integral to cover image than just hiding it in
the noise level.
Transform techniques embed the message by modulating coefficient in a transform
domain, such as the Discrete Fourier Transform, or Wavelet Transform. These methods
hide messages in significant areas of the cover image, which make them more robust to
attack. Transformations can be applied over the entire image, to block throughout the
image, or other variant.
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Image Steganography andbitmap pictures:
Using bitmap pictures for hiding secret information is one of most popular choices for
Steganography. Many types of software built for this purpose, some of these software
use password protection to encrypting information on picture. To use these software
you must have a ‘BMP’ format of a pictures to use it, but using other type of pictures
like “JPEG”, “GIF” or any other types is rather or never used, because of algorithm of
“BMP” pictures for Steganography is simple. Also we know that in the web most
popular of image types are “JPEG” and other types not “BPM”, so we should have a
solution for this problem.
This software provide the solution of this problem, it can accept any type of image to
hide information file, but finally it give the only “BMP” image as an output that has
hidden file inside it.
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Bitmap Steganography:
Bitmap typeis the simplest type of picture because that it doesn’t have any technology
for decreasing file size. Structure of these files is that a bitmap image created from
pixels that any pixel created from three colors ( red, green and blue said RGB) each
color of a pixel is one byte information that shows the density of that color. Merging
these three color makes every color that we see in these pictures. We know that every
byte in computer science is created from 8 bit that first bit is Most-Significant-Bit (MSB)
and last bit Least-Significant-Bit (LSB), the idea of using Steganography science is in this
place; we use LSB bit for writing our security information inside BMP pictures. So if we
just use last layer (8st layar) of information, we should change the last bit of pixels, in
other hands we have 3 bits in each pixel so we have 3*hight*width bits memory to write
our information. But before writing our data we must write name of data(file), size of
name of data & size of data. We can do this by assigning some first bits of memory (8st
layer).
(00101101 00011101 11011100)
(10100110 11000101 00001100)
(11010010 10101100 01100011)
Using each 3 pixel of picture to save a byte of data
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CHAPTER-5
System Analysis &Design
Steganography system requires any type of image file and the information or message
that is to be hidden. It has two modules encrypt and decrypt.
Microsoft .Net framework prepares a huge amount of tool and options for
programmers that they simples programming. One of .Net tools for pictures and
images is auto-converting most types of pictures to BMP format. I used this tool in this
software called “Steganography” that is written in C#.Net language and you can use
this software to hide your information in any type of pictures without any converting
its format to BMP (software converts inside it).
The algorithm used for Encryption and Decryption in this application provides using
several layers lieu of using only LSB layer of image. Writing data starts from last layer
(8st or LSB layer); because significant of this layer is least and every upper layer has
doubled significant from its down layer. So every step we go to upper layer image
quality decreases and image retouching transpires.
The encrypt module is used to hide information into the image; no one can see that
information or file. This module requires any type of image and message and gives the
only one image file in destination.
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The decrypt moduleis used to get the hidden information in an image file. It take the
image file as an output, and give two file at destination folder, one is the same image
file and another is the message file that is hidden it that.
Before encrypting file inside image we must save name and size of file in a definite
place of image. We could save file name before file information in LSB layer and save
file size and file name size in most right-down pixels of image. Writing this information
is needed to retrieve file from encrypted image in decryption state.
The graphical representation of this system is as follows:
Fig - 3
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Start Application
Encryption Decryption
Image file
BMP image file
Image Message file
CHAPTER-6
Results
User Manual
This isthe first screen which has two tab options – one is Encrypt Image for
encryption and another is Decrypt image for decryption. In right – top panel is
displays the information about the image such as size, height and width.
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Snap shot -2
2. For load image click on button “Browse” that is next to the Load Image
textbox.
3. The file open dialog box will displays as follows, select the Image file, which
you want to use hide information and click on Open button.
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4. The imagefile will opened and is displays as follows. Next, click on
“Browse” button that is next to the Load File textbox.
Snap shot - 4
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5. Again thefile open dialog box will appear, select any type of file whatever
you want to hide with the image and click on ok button.
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Snap shot -5
6. The next step is to encrypt the file. Now click on “Encrypt” button, it will
open the save dialog box which ask you to select the path to save the New
image file and the Image file name. The default format of image file is BMP.
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2. Next clickon the “Browse” button, which open the Open file dialog box, here
you have to select the image which is Encrypted and has hidden information file.
Select the image file and click on Open button.
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3. The imagefile displayed as follows:
Snap shot - 9
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4. Now clickon “Browse” button which is next to “Save file to” textbox. It will
open a dialog box that is “Browse for folder”. It ask you to select the path or
folder, where you want to extract the hidden file. Select the folder and click on
Ok button.
Snap shot - 10
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5. Now clickon Decrypt button, it will decrypt the image, the hidden file and
image file is saved into selected folder. The message for successful decryption is
displayed on the status bar which is places at bottom of the screen.
Snap shot - 11
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CHAPTER-7
Summary
Steganography is areally interesting subject and outside of the mainstream
cryptography and system administration that most of us deal with day after day.
Steganography can be used for hidden communication. We have explored the limits of
steganography theory and practice. We printed out the enhancement of the image
steganography system using LSB approach to provide a means of secure
communication. A stego-key has been applied to the system during embedment of the
message into the cover image.
This steganography application software provided for the purpose to how to use any
type of image formats to hiding any type of files inside their. The master work of this
application is in supporting any type of pictures without need to convert to bitmap, and
lower limitation on file size to hide, because of using maximum memory space in
pictures to hide the file.
Since ancient times, man has found a desire in the ability to communicate covertly. The
recent explosion of research in watermarking to protect intellectual property is evidence
that steganography is not just limited to military or espionage applications.
Steganography, like cryptography, will play an increasing role in the future of secure
communication in the “digital world”.
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CHAPTER-8
Bibliography
Websites
Following websites arereferring to create this project reports.
• http://www.google.com
• http://www.microsoft.com
• http://www.wikipedia.org
• http://projectabstracts.com
Books
Following books and ebook are used to complete this project reports.
• Mastering C# (Paperback)
• SQL Server Bible (Paperback)
• .NET Black Book (Paperback)
• Professional C#, 2nd Edition (Paperback)
• Professional ASP.NET (Paperback)
• MCAD/MCSD Self-Paced Training Kit: Developing Web Applications with Microsoft®
Visual Basic® .NET and Microsoft Visual C#® .NET, Second Edition
• MCAD/MCSE/MCDBA Self-Paced Training Kit: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Database
Design and Implementation, Exam 70-229, Second Edition
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Appendix
Encrypt - encryption
Decrypt– decryption
MSB – Most significant bit
RGB – red green blue color
LSB – least significant byte
Bmp – Bit map pictures
RAM – external memory
Jpeg – image type
Gif – graphical interface
Discrete fourier transform – covering methods
Bit and byte – image size unit
Algorithm – group of instructions
Jped - suspect file
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Figure and Tables
FigureNo. Description
Fig -1 Shows the model of Steganography.
Fig - 2 Shows a pyramid view b/w robustness ,security
and invisibility.
Fig - 3 Graphical representation of the system
Fig – 4 Encryption process
Fig - 5 Decryption process
Snap shots no description
Snap shot -1 User manual form
Snap shot -2 Encrypt select encrypt image tab option
Snap shot -3 Selecting view of image from the system
Snap shot -4 Form for encrypt the selective mage
Snap shot -5 Form to select any document which you want to
hide
Snap shot -6 Saving form in window
Snap shot -7 Form for hiding a image
Snap shot -8 Decrypt image tab form
Snap shot -9 Form for browsing
Snap shot -10 Image file displayed
Snap shot -11 For opening a folder
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