Steganography & Biometrics

(Vertical Mobility)

                              By
LAKSHMI NARAYANA INAMPUDI,
M.TECH,(PhD)
contents
ABOUT ME ABOUT PREREQUISIT
COURSE ES

WHAT IS THIS WHY SHOULD

COURSE? I LEARN?
 Name: Lakshmi Narayana Inampudi

About me
Experience:8 Years

Graduation: B.Tech,IT,   Gudlavalleru

Engineering College ,2010

Post Graduation: MTech ,CSE

,V.R.Sidhartha Engineering College,2014

PhD: Andhra University, Pursuing

About Course
PROFESSIONAL LECTURE : 4   CREDITS:3
ELECTIVE-V(IV-II)

INTERNAL MARK  EXTERNAL
S:40 MARKS: 60
Prerequisites

• Interest
• Discipline
• Goal
 • Steganography is the practice of concealing a file,
message, image, or video within another file, message,
image, or video. 

• The word steganography comes from Greek

What is it? word steganographia, which combines the words
steganós, meaning "covered or concealed", and
-graphia meaning "writing"

• Biometrics It is the automated use of One's own

phisiological or behavioural characteristics in order to
verify or identify individuals identity.
 RESEARCH MINI/MAJOR
PROJECT
Why should
I learn?

3 CREDITS
Objectives
• To familiarize with the concepts of stenographical
communication
• To introduce various verification , identification
technologies and matching measures of      Biometrics
• To impart various scan technologies.
 Outline outline the basic terminology of steganography.

Outcomes
Interpret interpret different scenarios related to steganalysis.

Distinguish distinguish between Biometric verification and identification.

apply Finger Scan and Facial Scan Technologies to provide person

Apply identification in logical  access  environment.

Compare and compare and contrast physiological biometrics with behavioral

contrast biometrics in terms of their accuracy.
Need of Data hiding
 The three main categories of information
hiding techniques
Data hiding
techniques 1.Cryptography

2.Steganography

3.Watermarking
Cryptography vs steganography vs watermarking
• Cryptography 
Steganography 

Steganography is a method of hiding secret data,

by embedding it into an audio, video, image or text
file. It is one of the methods employed to protect
secret or sensitive data from malicious attacks.
Real Time Example
• How is Steganography different from cryptography?
•
Cryptography and steganography are both methods used to hide or protect secret data.
However, they differ in the respect that cryptography makes the data unreadable, or
hides the meaning of the data, while steganography hides the existence of the data.
• In layman’s terms, cryptography is similar to writing a letter in a secret language:
people can read it,but won’t understand what it means. However, the existence of a
(probably secret) message would be obvious to anyone who sees the letter, and if
someone either knows or figures out your secret language, then your message can easily
be read.
• If you were to use steganography in the same situation, you would hide the letter inside
a pair of socks that you would be gifting the intended recipient of the letter. To those
who don’t know about the message, it would look like there was nothing more to your
gift than the socks. But the intended recipient knows what to look for, and finds the
message hidden in them.
Image Steganography
•
As the name suggests, Image Steganography refers to the process of hiding
data within an image file. The image selected for this purpose is called
the cover-image and the image obtained after steganography is called
the stego-image.
Image Steganography
Process  
How is it done?
•
An image is represented as an N*M (in case of greyscale images) or N*M*3 (in
case of colour images) matrix in memory, with each entry representing the
intensity value of a pixel.

• In image steganography, a message is embedded into an image by altering the

values of some pixels, which are chosen by an encryption algorithm. 

• The recipient of the image must be aware of the same algorithm in order to
known which pixels he or she must select to extract the message.
WATERMARKIN
G

A watermark is a form of text or image that is Digital watermarking is an  extension of  Watermarking embeds a signal directly into the data
impressed onto a text or image which provides watermarking concept in digital world. and the signal becomes an integral part of the data,
evidence of its authenticity.  travelling with the data to its destination.
Example 
Originally a watermark is a more or less transparent image or text that has been applied to a piece of paper, another image to
either protect the original image, or to make it harder to copy the item e.g. money watermarks or stamp watermarks.
            Unit-1    STEGANOGRAPHY

• Steganography is the act of covert communications, which means  that  only

the sender, Alice, and receiver, Bob, are aware of the secret communication.

• To accomplish this, the secret message is hidden within benign-looking

communications known as covertexts or cover Works. 

• To an adversary, Eve, it is clear that Alice and Bob are communicating, but

the combined covertext and hidden message, referred to as a stegotext or
stego Work, appears to be innocuous (i.e.,Eve is unaware that the innocuous
content hides a message).
• The main requirement of steganography is undetectability, which,
loosely defined, means that no algorithm exists that can determine whether a
Work contains a hidden message. 

• Steganalysis is the process of detection of steganographic communications. 

Definition
• steganography is the practice of undetectably altering a Work to embed a message
STEGANOGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION
• The first informal definition of a steganographic scheme was formulated by
    Simmons as the Prisoners’ Problem. 
• Two prisoners, Alice and Bob, are under the surveillance of a warden, Eve.
• The warden will permit Alice and Bob to communicate, but all
communications must go through the warden. 
• If the warden thinks that Alice’s message to Bob is innocuous(not
dangerous/harmful), she may simply forward it to Bob. 
• Alternatively, she may intentionally distort the content (e.g.,apply lossy
compression) in the hope that such a distortion will remove any secret
message that just might be present. 
• If the warden thinks Alice’s message to Bob hides a covert communication,
then she may block the communication entirely.
STEGANOGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION
 The Channel
• In steganography, the physical channel used for communication is generally
assumed noise free, as this can be ensured using error correction and standard
Internet protocols.
• Instead, the channel’s properties are defined by the warden.
• The warden is considered a part of the channel because she may, or may not
interfere with the communication

• As such, there are three types of warden:

Passive 
Active 
Malicious
Passive warden:  

• If The warden is restricted from modifying the content sent by Alice prior to
receipt by Bob (i.e., the warden can only prevent or permit delivery of Alice’s
message). 
• In this scenario, the warden tests each communication from Alice for the presence
of a covert message.
• If the warden’s test is negative, the communication is relayed to Bob. Otherwise it
is blocked.
• This is the most commonly assumed scenario and why most steganographic
algorithms are not designed to be robust.
Active Warden  

• If The warden intentionally modifies the content sent by Alice prior to receipt by
Bob.
• In this scenario, the warden may not be entirely confident of her steganalysis
program
• Thus, even though her tests are negative,the warden may alter the content, hoping
that the modification will destroy any steganographic message that might be
present.
• If the steganographic algorithm assumes a passive warden, then there is a good
chance that alterations to the content will severely degrade or remove the hidden
message.
• The types of modification an active warden might apply include lossy
recompression of images and audio clips, low-pass filtering, and other procedures
that slightly degrade the content.
Malicious warden 
• If the warden actions are based on the specifics of the steganographic scheme and are
aimed at catching the prisoners communicating secretly.
• This may include the warden trying to impersonate Alice or Bob or otherwise tricking
them
• A malicious warden is usually considered in public-key steganography.
• In this scenario, the stego key is known and anyone can extract the secret message.
•  However, the message is encrypted using a public-key cryptosystem. Only those who
possess Bob’s private key can decipher Alice’s message.
• Even though the stego key is known, it is difficult to distinguish between an
encrypted message and a random bit sequence extracted from a cover Work.
• Nevertheless, since the Warden also knows the stego key, she has more options to
attack the stego system .
• We will not consider cases where the warden is active or malicious, since the vast
majority of research in steganography is concerned with the passive warden scenario.
The Building Blocks 
The main building blocks of any steganographic algorithm are:

1. The choice of the cover Work.

2. The embedding and extracting algorithms, which might include
    a. Symbol assignment function.
    b. The embedding modification.
    c. The selection rule.
3. Stego key management.
1.The choice of the cover Work
• Unlike a watermark, a steganographic message says nothing about the cover Work
in which it is hidden.
• Consequently, the steganographer is free to choose a particular cover Work from his
or her source of covers.
• The main restriction is the source of cover Works, which is determined by the
resources available to Alice and Bob, by the warden herself, and the context in
which the communication takes place
• It is intuitively clear that noisy or highly textured images will better mask any
embedding changes than high-quality images with little content (e.g.,blue sky
images).
• Alternatively, Alice can think ahead and attempt to guess what tests the warden is
going to use and embed the same message into many different covers, run known
steganalysis attacks on each stego Work, and then simply send the cover that passes
the tests
2.The embedding and extracting algorithms
• Given the source of cover Works (e.g., a class of images or songs),Alice and Bob need to
construct the embedding and extraction functions.
• In steganography both the embedding and extracting functions are jointly defined.
• Fundamentally, an embedding function can be based on three different principles, namely:

Principle 1:  The cover Works are pre existing and the embedder does not modify
the cover Works. This is referred to  as  steganography by cover lookup.
Principle 2: The cover Works are generated based on the hidden message
and  the embedder does not modify the cover Works. This is referred to as cover synthesis.
Principle 3:  The cover Works are pre existing and the embedder modifies the
cover Works. This is referred to as steganography by cover modification.
Ø Principle 1: steganography by cover lookup
• How can we send a message without modifying the cover Work? 
• Consider the case where Alice only needs to send, say, 10 bits to Bob. Then, if Alice has a
collection of approximately  (210) i.e1,000 songs, she can determine which song, concatenated
with their shared key, hashes to the desired 10-bit message. Hence, steganography by cover
lookup. 
• Since the song has not been modified in any way, it is almost impossible for the warden to
determine that a steganographic message is present.
•  Of course, as the required payload(message to be send) increases, this solution quickly
becomes impractical.
• To send 20 bits requires a million(220) songs, and to send 30 bits requires a billion(230) songs.
• Although Alice might solve this problem by sending 10k bits at a time, a 10k-bit message
would require the transmission of 1,000 songs, which might raise the suspicion of the warden.
• Principle 2:steganography by cover synthesis 
• The program SpamMimic (http://www.spammimic.com) will encode a short
message into a document that resembles a typical spam.
• Basically, the sentences produced by the program are a function of the
secret message.
•  Because spammers use unusual spellings, punctuation, and sentence structures,
it is rather hard to distinguish spam containing a hidden message from regular
spam.
Principle 3:steganography by cover modification
• Steganography by cover modification describes methods where Alice alters
an existing cover Work to create a stego Work that conveys the desired message. This
approach is both the most common and the most advanced.
• we will only focus on this class of steganographic algorithms
• The type of changes introduced by the embedder, together with the location of these
changes within the cover Work, have a major influence on how secret the embedded
message will be.
• Intuitively, changes of large magnitude will be more obvious than changes of smaller
magnitude. Consequently,
• most steganographic schemes try to modify the cover Work as little as possible.
• The location of the changes is controlled by the selection rule. 
• There are three types of selection rules: sequential, (pseudo) random, and adaptive.
1. Sequential selection rule
• A sequential selection rule embeds the message bits in individual elements
of the cover Work in a sequential manner, for example, starting in the upper
left corner of an image and proceeding in a row-wise manner to the lower right
Corner.
•  Although the sequential selection rule is the easiest one to implement,it
provides poor security, since steganalysis algorithms can inspect the statistical
properties of pixels in the same order, looking for a sudden change in behavior.
2.Pseudo-random selection rule:
• A pseudo-random selection rule embeds the message bits in a pseudo-randomly
selected subset of the cover Work. 
• The sender might first use a  secret stego key, Ks, to initialize a pseudo-random
number generator (PRNG) that in turn generates a pseudo-random walk
through the cover Work. 
• The message bits are then embedded into the elements constituting this walk.
Pseudo-random selection rules typically offer better security than sequential
rules.
3.Adaptive selection rule
• An adaptive selection rule embeds the message bits at locations that are
determined based on the content of the cover Work. The motivation for this is that
statistical detectability is likely to depend on the content of the cover work.
• For example, it will be more difficult to detect embedding changes in noisy
images or in highly textured areas of the image compared with smooth, uniform
areas.
• Thus, one may desire to adjust the selection rule to the specific content of the
cover Work.
• The selection rule could depend on the variance of pixels within a small local
neighborhood. Only pixels whose local neighborhood variance exceeds a certain
threshold would be candidates to be modified.
Key Management
• The process of embedding is controlled by a secret key shared between Alice and Bob.
• The key can be used for several different purposes. As previously mentioned, the key
may seed a pseudo-random number generator to generate a random walk through the
cover Work.
• Alice and Bob do not have to use, and in fact should not use, the same stego key for
every cover.
• Imagine that the covers are all images of the same dimensions. Then, a fixed stego key
would produce the same pseudo- random embedding walk in every cover. 
• The warden could use the fact that the embedding changes between different covers
are correlated to mount an attack. 
• Thus, Alice and Bob may wish to adopt a more sophisticated key management and
periodically change the key according to some pre-agreed protocol.
• It is important to choose strong stego keys, otherwise the warden could attack
the steganographic scheme simply by trying to read messages from the stego
Work using all possible stego keys. 
• In general, it is always a good practice to encrypt the message before
embedding. The crypto key could be derived from the stego key or could be
chosen independently.
•  The second choice provides better security in cases where the stego key is
Compromised.
• The primary goal of steganography is to design embedding functions that are
statistically undetectable and capable of communicating practical (i.e.,
large)payloads.
 NOTATION AND TERMINOLOGY
• We now mathematically define a steganographic scheme.
• Let Ks denote a stego key drawn from a set, K, of all secret stego keys, 
  M the set of all embeddable messages, and C the set of all cover Works.
• A steganographic scheme is formed by two mappings, the embedding mapping,
Emb, and the extraction mapping, Ext:
                 Emb: C × K × M → C
                   Ext: C → M
   such that Ext(Emb (c, Ks, m)) = m for all c ∈ C, Ks ∈ K, and m ∈ M. 
• The Work s = Emb (c, Ks, m) is called the stego Work.
• The embedding algorithm Emb takes the cover Work, the secret key, and the
message as its input and produces the modified stego Work.
• For a given embedding function, the cardinality, |M|, of the set, M, is the number
of different messages that can be embedded in a specific Work. 
• The logarithm,log2 |M|, is called the embedding capacity and its units are bits.