New results on robustness of secure steganography

Mark T. Hogan; Félix Balado; Neil J. Hurley; Guénolé C. M. Silvestre

doi:10.1117/12.643139

16 February 2006 New results on robustness of secure steganography

Mark T. Hogan, Félix Balado, Neil J. Hurley, Guénolé C. M. Silvestre

Proceedings Volume 6072, Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents VIII; 60720U (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.643139
Event: Electronic Imaging 2006, 2006, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

Steganographic embedding is generally guided by two performance constraints at the encoder. Firstly, as is typical in the field of watermarking, all the transmission codewords must conform to an average power constraint. Secondly, for the embedding to be statistically undetectable (secure), it is required that the density of the watermarked signal must be equal to the density of the host signal. Assuming that this is not the case, statistical steganalysis will have a probability of detection error less than 1/2 and the communication may be terminated. Recent work has shown that some common watermarking algorithms can be modified such that both constraints are met. In particular, spread spectrum (SS) communication can be secured by a specific scaling of the host before embedding. Also, a side informed scheme called stochastic quantization index modulation (SQIM), maintains security with the use of an additive stochastic element during the embedding. In this work the performance of both techniques is analysed under the AWGN channel assumption. It will be seen that the robustness of both schemes is lessened by the steganographic constraints, when compared to the standard algorithms on which they are based. Specifically, the probability of decoding error in the SS technique increases when security is required, and the achievable rate of SQIM is shown to be lower than that of dither modulation (on which the scheme is based) for a finite alphabet size.

Citation Download Citation

Mark T. Hogan, Félix Balado, Neil J. Hurley, and Guénolé C. M. Silvestre "New results on robustness of secure steganography", Proc. SPIE 6072, Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents VIII, 60720U (16 February 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.643139

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