Steganography - An Overview

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message itself is not disguised, but the content is obscured.

The word "Steganography" is of Greek origin and means "covered, or hidden writing". Its ancient origins can be traced back to 440 BC. Herodotus mentions two examples of Steganography in The Histories of Herodotus. Demeratus sent a warning about a forthcoming attack to Greece by writing it on a wooden panel and covering it in wax. Wax tablets were in common use then as re-usable writing surface, sometimes used for shorthand. Another ancient example is that of Histiaeus, who shaved the head of his most trusted slave and tattooed a message on it. After his hair had grown the message was hidden. The purpose was to instigate a revolt against the Persians. Later, Johannes Trithemius's book Steganographia is a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on black magic.

Generally, a steganographic message will appear to be something else: a picture, an article, a shopping list, or some other message - the covertext. Classically, it may be hidden by using invisible ink between the visible lines of innocuous documents, or even written onto clothing. During World War II a message was once written in morse code along two-colored knitting yarn. Another method is invisible ink underlining, or simply pin pricking of individual letters in a newspaper article, thus forming a message. It may even be a few words written under a postage stamp, the stamp then being the covertext.

The advantage of steganography over cryptography alone is that messages do not attract attention to themselves, to messengers, or to recipients. An unhidden coded message, no matter how unbreakable it is, will arouse suspicion and may in itself be incriminating, as in some countries encryption is illegal.

Steganography uses in electronic communication include steganographic coding inside of a transport layer, such as an MP3 file, or a protocol, such as UDP.

Steganographic messages are often first encrypted by some traditional means, and then a covertext is modified in some way to contain the encrypted message, resulting in stegotext. For example, the letter size, spacing, typeface, or other characteristics of a covertext can be manipulated to carry the hidden message; only the recipient (who must know the technique used) can recover the message and then decrypt it. Roger Bacon is known to have suggested such a technique to hide messages

Steganographic Techniques

Modern Steganographic Techniques

Concealing messages within the lowest bits of noisy images or sound files.

Concealing data within encrypted data. The data to be concealed is first encrypted before being used to overwrite part of a much larger block of encrypted data. This technique works most effectively where the decrypted version of data being overwritten has no special meaning or use. Examples of software that use this technique include FreeOTFE and TrueCrypt.

Chaffing and winnowing

Invisible ink

Null ciphers

Concealed messages in tampered executable files, exploiting redundancy in the i386 instruction set.

Embedded pictures in video material (optionally played at slower or faster speed).

A new steganographic technique involves injecting imperceptible delays to packets sent over the network from the keyboard. Delays in keypresses in some applications (telnet or remote desktop) can mean a delay in packets, and the delays in the packets can be used to encode data. There is no extra processor or network activity, so the steganographic technique is "invisible" to the user. This kind of steganography could be included in the firmware of keyboards, thus making it invisible to the system. The firmware could then be included in all keyboards, allowing someone to distribute a keylogger program to thousands without their knowledge.

Content-Aware Steganography hides information in the semantics a human user assigns a datagram; these systems offer security against a non-human adversary/warden.

Historical Steganographic Techniques

Steganography has been widely used in historical times, especially before cryptographic systems were developed. Examples of historical usage include:

Hidden messages in wax tablets: in ancient Greece, people wrote messages on the wood, then covered it with wax so that it looked like an ordinary, unused tablet.

Hidden messages on messenger's body: also in ancient Greece. Herodotus tells the story of a message tattooed on a slave's shaved head, hidden by the growth of his hair, and exposed by shaving his head again. The message, if the story is true, carried a warning to Greece about Persian invasion plans.

Hidden messages on paper written in secret inks under other messages or on the blank parts of other messages.

During and after World War II, espionage agents used microdots to send information back and forth. Since the dots were typically extremely small -- the size of a period produced by a typewriter (perhaps in a font with 10 or 12 characters per inch) or even smaller -- the stegotext was whatever the dot was hidden within. If a letter or an address, it was some alphabetic characters. If under a postage stamp, it was the presence of the stamp. The problem with the WWII microdots was that they needed to be written in a special ink, easily detected by holding a suspected paper up to a light and viewing it almost edge on. The microdot ink would shine when viewed from an extreme angle while the normal ink would not.

More obscurely, during World War II, a spy for the Japanese in New York City, Velvalee Dickinson, sent information to accommodation addresses in neutral South America. She was a dealer in dolls, and her letters discussed how many of this or that doll to ship. The stegotext in this case was the doll orders; the 'plaintext' being concealed was itself a codetext giving information about ship movements, etc. Her case became somewhat famous and she became known as the Doll Woman.

The one-time pad is a theoretically unbreakable cipher that produces ciphertexts indistinguishable from random texts: only those who have the private key can distinguish these ciphertexts from any other perfectly random texts. Thus, any perfectly random data can be used as a covertext for a theoretically unbreakable steganography. A modern example of OTP: in most cryptosystems, private symmetric session keys are supposed to be perfectly random (that is, generated by a good RNG), even very weak ones (for example, shorter than 128 bits). This means that users of weak crypto (in countries where strong crypto is forbidden) can safely hide OTP messages in their session keys.

An Example from Modern Practice

Image of a tree. By removing all but the last 2 bits of each color component, an almost completely black image results. Making the resulting image 85 times brighter results in the second image.

Image extracted from original image.

The larger the cover message is (in data content terms — number of bits) relative to the hidden message, the easier it is to hide the latter. For this reason, digital pictures (which contain large amounts of data) are used to hide messages on the Internet and on other communication media. It is not clear how commonly this is actually done. For example: a 24-bit bitmap will have 8 bits representing each of the three color values (red, green, and blue) at each pixel. If we consider just the blue there will be 2⁸ different values of blue. The difference between say 11111111 and 11111110 in the value for blue intensity is likely to be undetectable by the human eye. Therefore, the least significant bit can be used (more or less undetectably) for something else other than color information. If we do it with the green and the red as well we can get one letter of ASCII text for every three pixels.

Stated somewhat more formally, the objective for making steganographic encoding difficult to detect is to ensure that the changes to the carrier (the original signal) due to the injection of the payload (the signal to covertly embed) are visually (and ideally, statistically) negligible; that is to say, the changes are indistinguishable from the noise floor of the carrier.

(From an information theoretical point of view, this means that the channel must have more capacity than the 'surface' signal requires, that is, there must be redundancy. For a digital image, this may be noise from the imaging element; for digital audio, it may be noise from recording techniques or amplification equipment. Any system with an analog (signal) amplification stage will also introduce so-called thermal or "1/f" noise, which can be exploited as a noise cover. In addition, lossy compression schemes (such as JPEG) always introduce some error into the decompressed data; it is possible to exploit this for steganographic use as well.)

Steganography can be used for digital watermarking, where a message (being simply an identifier) is hidden in an image so that its source can be tracked or verified.

In the era of Digital video recorder and devices like TiVo, TV commercials authors have figured out how to make use of such devices as well - by putting a hidden message which becomes visible when played at frame-by-frame speed (see KFC Unveils 'TiVo-proof' Ad).

Additional Terminology

In general, terminology analogous to (and consistent with) more conventional radio and communications technology is used; however, a brief description of some terms which show up in software specifically, and are easily confused, is appropriate. These are most relevant to digital steganographic systems.

The payload is the data it is desirable to transport (and, therefore, to hide). The carrier is the signal, stream, or data file into which the payload is hidden; contrast "channel" (typically used to refer to the type of input, such as "a JPEG image"). The resulting signal, stream, or data file which has the payload encoded into it is sometimes referred to as the package. The percentage of bytes, samples, or other signal elements which are modified to encode the payload is referred to as the encoding density and is typically expressed as a floating-point number between 0 and 1.

In a set of files, those files considered likely to contain a payload are called suspects. If the suspect was identified through some type of statistical analysis, it may be referred to as a candidate.

Rumored Usage in Terrorism

The rumors about terrorists using steganography started first in the daily newspaper USA Today on February 5, 2001.

The articles are still available online, and were titled "Terrorist instructions hidden online", and the same day, "Terror groups hide behind Web encryption". In July of the same year, the information looked even more precise: "Militants wire Web with links to jihad".

A citation from the USA Today article: "Lately, al-Qaeda operatives have been sending hundreds of encrypted messages that have been hidden in files on digital photographs on the auction site eBay.com". These rumors were cited many times - without ever showing any actual proof - by other media worldwide, especially after the terrorist attack of 9/11.

For example, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that an Al Qaeda cell which had been captured at the Via Quaranta mosque in Milan had had pornographic images on their computers, and that these images had been used to hide secret messages (although no other Italian paper ever covered the story).

The USA Today articles were written by veteran foreign correspondent Jack Kelley, who in 2004 was fired after allegations emerged that he had fabricated stories and invented sources.

In October 2001, the New York Times published an article claiming that al-Qaeda had used steganographic techniques to encode messages into images, and then transported these via email and possibly via USENET to prepare and execute the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack.

Despite being dismissed by security experts, the story has been widely repeated and resurfaces frequently. It was noted that the story apparently originated with a press release from "iomart", a vendor of steganalysis software. No corroborating evidence has been produced by any other source.

Moreover, a captured al-Qaeda training manual makes no mention of this method of steganography. The chapter on communications in the al-Qaeda manual acknowledges the technical superiority of US security services, and generally advocates low-technology forms of covert communication.

The chapter on "codes and ciphers" places considerable emphasis on using invisible inks in traditional paper letters, plus simple ciphers such as simple substitution with nulls; computerized image steganography is not mentioned.

Nevertheless public efforts were mounted to detect the presence of steganographic information in images on the web (especially on eBay, which had been mentioned in the New York Times article).

To date these scans have examined millions of images without detecting any steganographic content (see "Detecting Steganographic Content on the Internet" under external links), other than test images used to test the system, and instructional images on web sites about steganography.

Countermeasures

The detection of steganographically encoded packages is called steganalysis. The simplest method to detect modified files, however, is to compare them to the originals. To detect information being moved through the graphics on a website, for example, an analyst can maintain known-clean copies of these materials and compare them against the current contents of the site. The differences (assuming the carrier is the same) will compose the payload.

In general, using an extremely high compression rate makes steganography difficult, but not impossible; while compression errors provide a good place to hide data, high compression reduces the amount of data available to hide the payload in, raising the encoding density and facilitating easier detection (in the extreme case, even by casual observation).