New methodology for breaking steganographic techniques for JPEGs

Jessica Fridrich; Miroslav Goljan; Dorin Hogea

doi:10.1117/12.473142

20 June 2003 New methodology for breaking steganographic techniques for JPEGs

Jessica Fridrich, Miroslav Goljan, Dorin Hogea

Proceedings Volume 5020, Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents V; (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.473142
Event: Electronic Imaging 2003, 2003, Santa Clara, CA, United States

Abstract

In this paper, we present general methodology for developing attacks on steganographic systems for the JPEG image format. The detection first starts by decompressing the JPEG stego image, geometrically distorting it (e.g., by cropping), and recompressing. Because the geometrical distortion breaks the quantized structure of DCT coefficients during recompression, the distorted/recompressed image will have many macroscopic statistics approximately equal to those of the cover image. We choose such macroscopic statistic S that also predictably changes with the embedded message length. By doing so, we estimate the unknown message length by comparing the values of S for the stego image and the cropped/recompressed stego image. The details of this detection methodology are explained on the F5 algorithm and OutGuess. The accuracy of the message length estimate is demonstrated on test images for both algorithms. Finally, we identify two limitations of the proposed approach and show how they can be overcome to obtain accurate detection in every case. The paper is closed with outlining a condition that must be satisfied by all secure high-capacity steganographic algorithms for JPEGs.

Citation Download Citation

Jessica Fridrich, Miroslav Goljan, and Dorin Hogea "New methodology for breaking steganographic techniques for JPEGs", Proc. SPIE 5020, Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents V, (20 June 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.473142

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