Batch Steganography and Pooled Steganalysis

Abstract

Abstract. Conventional steganalysis aims to separate cover objects from stego objects, working on each object individually. In this paper we investigate some methods for pooling steganalysis evidence, so as to obtain more reliable detection of steganography in large sets of objects, and the dual problem of hiding information securely when spreading across a batch of covers. The results are rather surprising: in many situations, a steganographer should not spread the embedding across all covers, and the secure capacity increases only as the square root of the number of objects. We validate the theoretical results, which are rather general, by testing a particular type of image steganography. The experiments involve tens of millions of repeated steganalytic attacks and show that pooled steganalysis can give very reliable detection of even tiny proportionate payloads.

RABS: Rule-Based Adaptive Batch Steganography

“…The use of small embedding rates provided by batch steganography seems attractive in this sense. Ker in (Ker, 2006) takes the main following assumptions about the batch steganography process:…”

“…Consequently, the large secret data is hidden in a set of cover images and the resulted set of stego images is passed through the communication channel. This technique is called Batch steganography, which is first proposed by Ker (Ker, 2006). He states in (Ker, 2008) that in batch steganography, the best choice for the steganographer is to spread the secret data equally between cover images.…”

“…SBS divides the secret data into some parts of equal size and embeds each part in a cover image separately (Ker, 2006;Ker, 2008). Since in SBS the steganographer embeds in cover images blindly without considering the differences between various cover images, two problems may be occurred.…”

“…As discussed in (Ker, 2006), some of these assumptions are taken in order to establish a proper theoretical framework for the unexplored subject of batch steganography. However, these assumptions may not be totally applicable to a practical case.…”

Asymptotic Behavior of the ZZW Embedding Construction

“…In this paper, we prove this experimental observation and derive a closed form expression for the value of the limit. The performance of a steganographic scheme in the zero-payload limit is important, for example, to avoid detection over multiple uses of the stego channel [9].…”