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09 - Chapter 1 Jain Univer
09 - Chapter 1 Jain Univer
09 - Chapter 1 Jain Univer
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION TO STEGANOGRAPHY
1.1 INTRODUCTION
The fast growth of the electronic era has led to all documentations,
audio and video being digitized. This has increased the requirement for
ensuring the safety and reliability of any document, audio and video to
maintain privacy, and to prevent piracy and mass reproduction. This
requirement varies from an individual to individual. The techniques used for
ensuring this are cryptography and steganography of which the former is
perceptible as noise while the latter is imperceptible to the human eye.
(Petitcolas et al. 1999). World War I prisoners of war hid messages in Morse
code by using dots and dashes on alphabets like i.
Codebook
Encoder
Original Document Marked Document
In line shift coding, various lines inside the document are shifted up
or down by a small fraction like 1/300th of an inch based on a codebook. The
shifted lines are undetectable to the naked eye but detectable with a computer.
Differential encoding techniques like shifting a line without moving the
adjacent lines are also used. By shifting a line up or down, a single bit, 0 or 1
can be represented, thus hiding large amounts of information using this
encoding in a document.
White spaces can be used to hide data. When used properly, white
spaces can be manipulated to store data bits. Adding certain amount of white
spaces towards the end of line can correspond to a certain bit value. Since all
text editors skip white spaces towards the end of lines, it goes unnoticed by a
casual viewer. In a large document this can result in hiding a few lines of text
or secret codes like SNOW (Kwan 2001).
Information hiding can also happen with unobtrusive text where the
grammar can be used to store messages. Compris Intelligence, is a program,
which uses this technique to hide secret information. Sentences are changed
retaining the implied meaning. For example “An auto can be driven fast on a
slippery road over the hill.” means the same as “During downhill drive on an ice
covered hill road, the auto can be driven very fast”. Random words in text can
also be used to encode information, where different words have different values.
It is easy to decide clever implementation by creating a spam email with a secret
message (Wayner 2003). Sir Francis in the 16th Century used messages with two
font faces namely bold and normal fonts. A secret message could be decoded
by judging the positions of the bold characters (Hipschman 1995).
7
1.3.8 XML
XML tags can be used to hide secret information. For example bit
string 01110 can be encoded with the following code in XML document
Empty space in an XML Tag and an attribute order can also be used
to hide information. For example, element A and then element B can be
implied to be a bit value of 1 while A followed by C could be 0.
1.5.1 Video
1.5.2 DNA
(T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G), which protrude from a sugar-phosphate
backbone. Tabulation is drawn representing three base combinations. To
create a secret message, DNA is synthesized using this tabulation of bases.
Secret information is placed between DNA strands and act as markers for
secret communication. DNA strands are added randomly to prevent the
detection of the secret message. DNA’s being minute like dot are sent on a
book, thus making it difficult to trace and retrieve.
The spirit that virtuous engineers should also burn the midnight oil with
courage and determination to thwart the plans of equally hard-working
hackers is yet another reason to pursue the research on this area.
Development of