Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking-Attacks and Countermeasures

Dr. Sushil Jajodia is Professor and Chairman of the Dept. of Information and Software Engineering, and Director of the Center for Secure Information Systems at the George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures deals with information hiding. With the proliferation of multimedia on the Internet, information hiding addresses two areas of concern: privacy of information from surveillance (steganography) and protection of intellectual property (digital watermarking).
Steganography (literally, covered writing) explores methods to hide the existence of hidden messages. These methods include invisible ink, microdot, digital signature, covert channel, and spread spectrum communication. Digital watermarks represent a commercial application of steganography. Watermarks can be used to track the copyright and ownership of electronic media.
In this volume, the authors focus on techniques for hiding information in digital media. They analyze the hiding techniques to uncover their limitations. These limitations are employed to devise attacks against hidden information. The goal of these attacks is to expose the existence of a secret message or render a digital watermark unusable. In assessing these attacks, countermeasures are developed to assist in protecting digital watermarking systems. Understanding the limitations of the current methods will lead us to build more robust methods that can survive various manipulation and attacks.
The more information that is placed in the public's reach on the Internet, the more owners of such information need to protect themselves from theft and false representation. Systems to analyze techniques for uncovering hidden information and recover seemingly destroyed information will be useful to law enforcement authorities in computer forensics and digital traffic analysis.
Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures presents the authors' research contributions in three fundamental areas with respect to image-based steganography and watermarking: analysis of data hiding techniques, attacks against hidden information, and countermeasures to attacks against digital watermarks.
Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking &endash; Attacks and Countermeasures is suitable for a secondary text in a graduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

1. Introduction.- 1.1 Steganography: Hiding Information.- 1.2 Steganography throughout History.- 1.3 Methods for Hiding Information.- 1.4 Attacks against Hidden Information.- 1.5 Countermeasures Against Attacks.- 1.6 Contributions & Future Work.- 1.7 Organization of the Book.- 2. Exploring Steganography.- 2.1 Digital Images.- 2.2 Hiding Information in Images.- 2.3 Issues in Information Hiding.- 2.4 Examples of Digital Image Steganography Software.- 2.5 Comments on Steganography.- 3. Steganalysis: Attacks Against Hidden Data.- 3.1 Detection: Seeing the Unseen.- 3.2 Distortion: Disabling Steganography and Watermarks.- 3.3 Application of Steganalysis: Forensic Investigation.- 3.4 Comments on Steganalysis.- 4. Countermeasures to Attacks.- 4.1 Countermeasures to Distortion.- 4.2 Stronger Watermarks.- 4.3 Recognition Based on Image Characteristics.- 4.4 Recovering Watermarks from Distorted Images.- 4.5 Comments on Countermeasures.- Appendix A: Hiding Data in Network Traffic.- Appendix B: Glossary of Methods to Distort Stego-Images.- References.