Steganography via Codes for Memory with Defective Cells

Steganography is the art of covert (undetectable) communication in which secret data is embedded in innocuous looking messages by slightly modifying them. The detectability of secret data is influenced, besides other factors, by the placement of embedding changes within the message and by the embedding efficiency—the number of bits embedded per one embedding change. In this paper, we first show that codes for memory with defective cells enable steganographic communication without sharing the placement of embedding changes. This allows construction of a new class of steganographic schemes with improved security. We then describe an efficient coding method for memory with defective cells based on the LT process that is suitable for steganographic applications. In the second part of the paper, we explore a different approach based on random linear codes on small blocks with the goal to decrease the number of embedding changes. The embedding efficiency of this approach is compared to theoretically achievable bounds.

[1]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Efficient Wet Paper Codes , 2005, Information Hiding.

[2]  Abbas El Gamal,et al.  On the capacity of computer memory with defects , 1983, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[3]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Perturbed quantization steganography , 2005, Multimedia Systems.

[4]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Writing on wet paper , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

[5]  Gérard D. Cohen,et al.  Covering Codes , 2005, North-Holland mathematical library.

[6]  Gustavus J. Simmons,et al.  The Prisoners' Problem and the Subliminal Channel , 1983, CRYPTO.

[7]  Chris Heegard.  Partitioned linear block codes for computer memory with 'stuck-at' defects , 1983, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[8]  Rainer Böhme,et al.  Exploiting Preserved Statistics for Steganalysis , 2004, Information Hiding.

[9]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Matrix embedding for large payloads , 2006, IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur..

[10]  R. Crandall,et al.  Some Notes on Steganography , 1999 .

[11]  Gregory A. Kabatiansky,et al.  Information hiding by coverings , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (Cat. No.03EX674).

[12]  Tadashi Wadayama,et al.  An algorithm for calculating the exact bit error probability of a binary linear code over the binary symmetric channel , 2002, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[13]  Shlomo Shamai,et al.  Nested linear/Lattice codes for structured multiterminal binning , 2002, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[14]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Wet paper codes with improved embedding efficiency , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[15]  Shuhong Gao,et al.  Random Krylov Spaces over Finite Fields , 2003, SIAM J. Discret. Math..