A Proposal of Digital Image Steganography and Forensics Based on the Structure of File Storage

Abstract

Steganography is a technology for transmitting secret messages in public channel by embedding secret information into a digital carrier. It has a wide range of applications in the Internet security thus has attracted great interests. Among all kinds of digital carriers, digital image has outstanding performance. To the best of our knowledge, the researches on image steganography mainly focus on the use of the feature of digital image in the spatial or frequency domain, while there are few researches on hiding information through the file format structure. Taking JPEG image standard as an example, this paper analyzes the file format structure as well as the compression procedure and reports a novel proposal of image steganography and forensics. The proposal uses the redundant channel between any marker segments in the JPEG format structure to embed the secret information. The validity of the proposal has been proved by experiments, and further study has shown that this proposal has no limitation on the hiding capacity and has good practicability.