Transform Domain technique

Introduction:
Since the rise of the Internet one of the most important factors of information technology and communication has been the security of information. Cryptography was created as a technique for securing the secrecy of communication and many different methods have been developed to encrypt and decrypt data in order to keep the message secret. Unfortunately it is sometimes not enough to keep the contents of a message secret, it may also be necessary to keep the existence of the message secret. The technique used to implement this, is called steganography. Steganography is the art and science of invisible communication. This is accomplished through hiding information in other information, thus hiding the existence of the communicated information. The word steganography is derived from the Greek words stegos meaning cover and grafia meaning writing defining it as covered writing. In image steganography the information is hidden exclusively in images. The idea and practice of hiding information has a long history. In Histories the Greek historian Herodotus writes of a nobleman, Histaeus, who needed to communicate with his son-in-law in Greece. He shaved the head of one of his most trusted slaves and tattooed the message onto the slaves scalp. When the slaves hair grew back the slave was dispatched with the hidden message. In the Second World War the Microdot technique was developed by the Germans. Information, especially photographs, was reduced in size until it was the size of a typed period. Extremely difficult to detect, a normal cover message was sent over an insecure channel with one of the periods on the paper containing hidden information. Today steganography is mostly used on computers with digital data being the carriers and networks being the high speed delivery channels. [1] Steganography finds its role in attempt to address these growing concerns. We know that, with the use of stenographic techniques, it is possible to hide information within digital audio, images and video files which is perceptually and statistically undetectable. The method of embedding secret message (which can be plain text, cipher text, or even images) is usually based on replacing bits of useless or unused data in the source cover (can be audio files, sound, text, Disk space, hidden partition, network packets, digital images, software, or circuitry). There are two common methods of embedding: Spatial embedding in which messages are inserted into the LSBs of image pixels, and Transform embedding in which a message is embedded by modifying frequency coefficients of the cover image (result is called the stego-image).Transform embedding methods are found to be in general more robust than the Spatial embedding methods which are susceptible to image-processing type of attacks.[2]

Steganography concepts:
Although steganography is an ancient subject, the modern formulation of it is often given in terms of the prisoners problem proposed by Simmons, where two inmates wish to communicate in secret to hatch an escape plan. All of their communication passes through a warden who will throw them in solitary confinement should she suspect any covert communication. The warden, who is free to examine all communication exchanged between the inmates, can either be passive or active. A passive warden simply examines the communication to try and determine if it potentially contains secret information. If she suspects a communication to contain hidden information, a passive warden takes note of the detected covert communication, reports this to some

outside party and lets the message through without blocking it. An active warden, on the other hand, will try to alter the communication with the suspected hidden information deliberately, in order to remove the information [1].

Image steganography:
As stated earlier, images are the most popular cover objects used for steganography. In the domain of digital images many different image file formats exist, most of them for specific applications. For these different image file formats, different stenographic algorithms exist. [1]

Image and Transform Domain:

Image steganography techniques can be divided into two groups: those in the Image Domain and those in the Transform Domain. Image also known as spatial domain techniques embed messages in the intensity of the pixels directly, while for transform also known as frequency domain, images are first transformed and then the message is embedded in the image. Image domain techniques encompass bitwise methods that apply bit insertion and noise manipulations are sometimes characterized as simple systems. The image formats that are most suitable for image domain steganography are lossless and the techniques are typically dependent on the image format. Steganography in the transform domain involves the manipulation of algorithms and image transforms. These methods hide messages in more significant areas of the cover image, making it more robust. Many transform domain methods are independent of the image format and the embedded message may survive conversion between loss and lossless compression. In the next sections stenographic algorithms will be explained in categories according to image file formats and the domain in which they are performed. [1]

Transform Domain:
To understand the steganography algorithms that can be used when embedding data in the transform domain, one must first explain the type of file format connected with this domain. The JPEG file format is the most popular image file format on the Internet, because of the small size of the images.

JPEG compression:
To compress an image into JPEG format, the RGB color representation is first converted to a YUV representation. In this representation the Y component corresponds to the luminance (or brightness) and the U and V components stand for chrominance (or color) . According to research the human eye is more sensitive to changes in the brightness (luminance) of a pixel than to changes in its color [11]. This fact is exploited by the JPEG compression by down sampling the color data to reduce the size of the file. The color components (U and V) are halved in horizontal and vertical directions, thus decreasing the file size by a factor of 2. The next step is the actual transformation of the image. For JPEG, the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is used, but similar transforms are for example the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). These mathematical transforms convert the pixels in such a way as to give the effect of spreading the location of the pixel values over part of the image. The DCT transforms a signal from an image representation into a frequency representation; by grouping the pixels into 8 8 pixel blocks and transforming the pixel blocks into 64 DCT coefficients each [19]. A modification of a single DCT

coefficient will affect all 64 image pixels in that block. The next step is the quantization phase of the compression. Here another biological property of the human eye is exploited: The human eye is fairly good at spotting small differences in brightness over a relatively large area, but not so good as to distinguish between different strengths in high frequency brightness. This means that the strength of higher frequencies can be diminished, without changing the appearance of the image. JPEG does this by dividing all the values in a block by a quantization coefficient. The results are rounded to integer values and the coefficients are encoded using Huffman coding to further reduce the size [1].

JPEG Steganography:
Originally it was thought that steganography would not be possible to use with JPEG images, since they use loss y compression which results in parts of the image data being altered. One of the major characteristics of steganography is the fact that information is hidden in the redundant bits of an object and since redundant bits are left out when using JPEG it was feared that the hidden message would be destroyed. Even if one could somehow keep the message intact it would be difficult to embed the message without the changes being noticeable because of the harsh compression applied. However, properties of the compression algorithm have been exploited in order to develop a stenographic algorithm for JPEGs. One of these properties of JPEG is exploited to make the changes to the image invisible to the human eye. During the DCT transformation phase of the compression algorithm, rounding errors occur in the coefficient data that are not noticeable. Although this property is what classifies the algorithm as being loss y, this property can also is used to hide messages. It is neither feasible nor possible to embed information in an image that uses loss y compression, since the compression would destroy all information in the process. Thus it is important to recognize that the JPEG compression algorithm is actually divided into loss y and lossless stages. The DCT and the quantization phase form part of the loss y stage, while the Huffman encoding used to further compress the data is lossless. Steganography can take place between these two stages. Using the same principles of LSB insertion the message can be embedded into the least significant bits of the coefficients before applying the Huffman encoding. By embedding the information at this stage, in the transform domain, it is extremely difficult to detect, since it is not in the visual domain.[1]

Jpeg-Jsteg:
One of the well-known embedding method of steganography based on Transform domain is Jpeg-Jsteg which embeds secret message (that is, in encoded form with help of Huffman codes) into LSB of the quantized DCT coefficients. There is one disadvantage of Jpeg-Jsteg that only few messages can be embedded in the cover-image. Also, Andreas Westfeld and Andreas Pfitzmann noticed that steganographic systems that change LSBs sequentially cause distortions detectable by steganalysis methods. They observed that for a given image, the embedding of high-entropy data (often due to encryption) changed the histogram of color frequencies in a predictable way. J.Fridrich has claimed that her method can potentially detect messages as short as any single bit change in a JPEG image. Chang has proposed a new Steganographic method to increase the message load in every block of the stegoimage while retaining the stego-image quality. He has suggested a modified quantization table such that the secret message can be embedded in the middle-frequency part of the quantized DCT coefficients. Moreover, his method is as secured as the original Jpeg-Jsteg. Neils Provos has proposed another method to counter the statistical attack known as OutGuess. In the first pass, similar to Jsteg, OutGuess embeds

message bits using a pseudo-random number generator to select DCT coefficients at random. After embedding, the image is processed again using a second pass. This time, corrections are made to the coefficients to make the stego-image histogram match the cover image histogram.[2]

T-codes:
We know that the best variable-length codes (VLC) are the Huffman codes. They are easy to construct for optimum efficiency if source statistics are known. But if they are used in serial communication, a loss of synchronization often results in a complex resynchronization process whose length and outcome are difficult to predict T-codes provide the solution to this problem. T-codes are families of variable-length codes (VLC) that exhibit extraordinarily strong tendency towards self-synchronization. Titchner proposed a novel recursive construction of T-codes known as the Generalized T-codes that retain the properties of self-synchronization. Gavin R. Higgie showed that in situation where code word synchronization is important, the T-codes can be used instead of Huffman codes, giving excellent self-synchronizing properties without sacrificing coding efficiency. The main advantage of the T-Code is that they are selfsynchronizing, so if some bits are lost or modified in a T-code encoded stream, the decoder will regain synchronization automatically. The best T-codes achieve self-synchronization within 1.5 characters following a lock loss. Thus, we can use T-codes in place of Huffman codes in the algorithms such as Jpeg-Jsteg. The advantage of this approach is the ability to send steganographic messages in lossy environment that are robust against detection or attack. A modified robust steganographic method using T-codes is proposed by Muttoo and Sushil [6] and is compared with steganography methods based on Jpeg-Jsteg and Outguess techniques. They have shown that using of T-codes as source encoding in place of Huffman codes result into better PSNR values. In this paper we propose T-codes for the encoding of original message and for the entropy encoding of compressed stego-image in place of Huffman codes. The proposed scheme takes advantage of the synchronizing ability of T-codes to increase the robustness of popularly used hiding techniques like Jpeg-Jsteg.[2]

PROPOSED ALGORITHM:
We have developed a novel steganographic method based on Jpeg-Jsteg, famous hiding-tool based on joint photographic expert group (JPEG).The embedding and extracting algorithms are summarized as under:

Embedding Algorithm:
Input: secret message, cover image Procedure: Step1. Step2. Step3. Step4.
Encode the message using the T- codes Divide the cover image into 8x8 blocks Calculate DCT coefficients for each block Quantize the coefficients

Step5. while complete message not

embedded do 5.1 get next DCT coefficient 5.2 if DCT 0 , DCT 1 and DCT -1 then 5.2.1 get next bit from Message

Extracting Algorithm:
Input: Stego image Procedure: Step1. Divide the stego image into 8x8 blocks Step2. Calculate DCT coefficients for each block Step3. Quantize the coefficients Step4.

while secret message not

completed do 4.1 get next DCT coefficient

4.2 if DCT 0 , DCT 1and DCT -1 then Concatenate DCT LSB to secret message end {if} end{while} Step5. Decode secret message bits using the T-codes end. Output: Secret message

References:
[1] T. Morkel,, J.H.P. Eloff, M.S. Olivier ,AN OVERVIEW OF IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY , (ICSA) Research Group [2] S. K. Muttoo, Sushil Kumar , Data Hiding in JPEG Images, Bharati Vidyapeeths Institute of Computer Applications and Management, New Delhi