Steganography concept - How to check my implementation?

Question

I have written my own software to do Steganography. Basically, I am dividing the message (text) into bits and then hide them into pixels in jpg. After that I am saving the bitmap into .png (because .jpg's conversion may destroy the hidden message).

1. I would like to test my software. Do you know any framework that may find my text hidden in the image file? Or even if such a framework will be able to detect the fact of hidden message?

2. I am wondering what is the ideal implementation of steganography for images? I would like to master it. I have written my code just with my knowledge and my ideas, without looking into any theories. After speaking with my professor, he suggested that others may have implemented the same idea, and there may be some ways to make it better. Does anyone have some suggestions for me? Any name of concepts? Any algorithm names? Any papers?

Answer 1

To test your software you need to be able to recover your hidden message. The essence of an effective steganographic method is that it be consistently reversible. You should be able to remove the masking image in your case.

This answer on detecting steganography may provide some insight into testing approaches:

To detect Steganography it really comes down to statistical analysis (not a subject I know very well). But here are a few pages that may help you out.

• Steganography Countermeasures and detection
  • Wikipedia page worth a read to cover the basics.
• An Overview of Steganography for the Computer Forensics Examiner - Has quite a long list of tools and some other useful information.
• Steganography Detection - Some more information about Stegonography.
• Steganography Detection with Stegdetect - Stegdetect is an automated tool for detecting steganographic content in images. It is capable of detecting several different steganographic methods to embed hidden information in JPEG images. Tool hasn't been updated in quite a while but it was the best looking free tool I could find with a quick search.

SOURCE: https://security.stackexchange.com/a/2145

There are a few common strategies for performing steganography:

1. Least significant bit insertion
2. Masking and filtering
3. Algorithms and transformations: taking advantage of the native format's own compression algorithms

SOURCE: http://www.infosyssec.com/infosyssec/Steganography/techniques.htm

There are several papers on this topic including Hussain, Mehdi, Mureed Hussain, A Survey of Image Steganography Techniques which discusses different techniques and introduces terminology:

• Cover-Image: Original image which is used as a carrier for hidden information.

• Message: Actual information which is used to hide into images. Message could be a plain text or some other image.

• Stego-Image: After embedding message into cover image is known as stego-image.

• Stego-Key: A key is used for embedding or extracting the messages from cover-images and stego-images