Visual Detection of LSB-Encoded Natural Image Steganography

PAUL WATTERS Medical Research Council FRANCES MARTIN University of Tasmania and H. STEFFEN STRIPF Macquarie University

Many steganographic systems embed hidden messages inside the least signicant bit layers of colour natural images. The presence of these messages can be difcult to detect by using statistical steganalysis. However, visual steganalysis by humans may be more successful in natural image discrimination. This study examined whether humans could detect least-signicant bit steganography in 15 color natural images from the VisTex database using a controlled same/different task (N = 58) and a yes/no task (N = 61). While d > 1 was observed for color layers 48, layers 13 had d < 1 in both experiments. Thus, layers 13 appear to be highly resistant to visual steganalysis. Categories and Subject Descriptors: J.4 [Social and Behavioral Sciences]: Psychology; J.7 [Computers in Other Systems]: Military; C.2 [Computer Communication Networks]: C.2.0 GeneralSecurity and protection General Terms: Security, Experimentation, Human Factors Additional Key Words and Phrases: Steganography, counterterrorism ACM Reference Format: Watters, P., Martin, F., and Stripf, H. S. 2008. Visual detection of LSB-encoded natural image steganography. ACM Trans. Appl. Percpt. 4, 1, Article 5 (January 2008), 12 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1328775 http://doi.acm.org/ 10.1145.1328775

1.

INTRODUCTION

Steganography has long been used to facilitate secret communications: tattooed heads concealed by hair, wooden tablets covered with wax, and even digital watermarking in the modern age have been used to conceal one message inside another. This hiding of information inside an innocuous cover source has been effective in concealing communication acts. The key principles of steganography are that the concealed message should not degrade the quality or content of the cover message and that the concealed message should be as invisible as possible. An excellent historical overview of the eld can
Authors address: Paul A. Watters, MRC Unit for Lifelong Health & Ageing, 119 Torrington Place, London WCIE 6BT, UK; Frances Martin, School of Psychology, University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay TAS 7005, Australia; H. Steffen Stripf, Postgraduate Professional Development Program, Division of ICS, Macquarie University NSW 2109, Australia. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for prot or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the rst page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specic permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. c 2008 ACM 1544-3558/2008/01-ART5 $5.00 DOI 10.1145/1328775 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1328775
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be found in Petitcolas et al. [1999]. Contemporary interest in steganography has arisen from several media reports (e.g., Kelly [2001]) that terrorists have been embedding secret messages inside natural images and distributing these on the Internet. By natural images, we mean those that are encountered in the natural worldthose that the human visual system is optimized to process (in contrast, there have been no reports of information hiding within synthetic images or random noise). The technology used is similar to digital watermarking, where a copyright owner embeds a mark of ownership inside the pixels of an image, providing proof of ownership. In steganographic terms, given that natural images capture the enormous variation in texture, luminance, and contrast that exists in the physical world [Field 1987], they provide an ideal cover for concealed Internet communications. Technologies like the World Wide Web make extensive use of natural images. Note that steganography is not to be confused with cryptography, where the transformation of a message is performed using a cipher. Encrypted messages are also often communicated across public channels, like the Internet. One reason why steganography may be preferable to cryptography is that the use of cryptographic protocols leaves telltale signatures that can be trivially identied by intercepting third parties [Rescorla 2001], steganographic algorithms do not leave such an obvious marker. However, if a cover like a natural image is chosen, the statistical distribution of luminances within the cover may reveal the fact that the cover has been tampered with in some waybut it will not immediately indicate which technique was actually used. It may also be possible to examine color histograms to determine if there are any deviations from normal [Maes 1998]. Cryptography is not required for steganography, although steganography can be used to conceal an encrypted message. Hiding messages within natural images on the Internet facilitates secure and highly scalable group communications, since the target message is encoded only once with the cover. If the sender had to send an asymmetrically encrypted message to all potential recipients, perhaps using PGPmail or similar, then the message would have to be reencrypted for each recipient. Not only is this approach not scalable, it also alerts content lters on rewalls and routers to the fact that encrypted trafc is being transmitted. The rewall could then either block the trafc, or at the very least, identify the sender and receiver. This is one reason why battleeld communication systems use spread-spectrum modulation, because being able to identify the transmission point of an encrypted message easily reveals the senders physical location. A form of spread spectrum modulation introduced by Marvel et al. [1999] has been adapted in many steganographic techniques. A less suspicious and more efcient method for concealing communications would involve encoding the message inside another, less conspicuous object, such as an image, movie, or MP3 music le [Wayner 2002]. Thus, if a message is intercepted by a third party, its cover le can be viewed (images) or played (movies or MP3s) as if it was a normal multimedia le. If this cover le is posted to a Usenet forum, added to a web page, or distributed using a peer-to-peer distributed le system, then the intended recipients will be able to extract the hidden message, while other users will not even be aware of the concealed content. It is important to note that the encoded message does not have to be textit could also be a photo, movie, or sound recording. Clearly, there are many possible permutations, making the detection task challenging. A related detection problem is the large volume of data to be examined. Usenet posts total several gigabytes of data every day, but if a steganographic message is detected, it could be traced to its source, since the posting host can be readily identied. However, anonymous peer-to-peer le sharing systems often deliberately remove the source information from message exchanges, so that end-users cannot be identied [Waldman et al. 2000]. Both of these techniques are asynchronous and are less useful than real-time secure group communications. However, if a message exchange schedule is agreed ahead of time or out of band (i.e., not using the same communications channel), then this limitation is easily overcome if anonymity is a priority.
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The goal of this study was to determine whether steganography could be detected in natural images by visual steganalysis alone, given that statistical attacks have previously failed [Wayner 2002]. Natural images were chosen as the cover, because these were reportedly used by terrorists to exchange messages on the Internet [Kelly 2000]. By natural images, we mean any depictions of any structure that may be encountered in the physical world. To this end, we utilized the MIT Vision Texture database (http://vismod.media.mit.edu/vismod/imagery/VisionTexture/vistex.html), using images from both the homogeneous reference texture and multiple texture scene datasets. The aim of the experiments reported here was to see if human judges could discriminate between a cover image, which was encoded in one of the eight different color layers found in bitmapped images. The hypothesis was that human judges, in a controlled environment, would be able to discriminate whether a cover image contained an encoded message, compared to the same cover image, which had no encoded message. 2. STEGANALYSIS

Steganalysis can be performed by examining the statistics of the cover image or by visual inspection. In this section, the two approaches are reviewed, with the conclusion that visual steganalysis has the best chance for identifying concealed messages, because the human visual system is optimized for natural image processing. 2.1 Statistical Steganalysis

Natural images are commonly found on the Internet, on web sites, in peer-to-peer distributed le sharing systems, and Usenet forums. This makes them ideal as covers for steganography, but their sparse structure [Field 1987] also means that they only represent a subset of all possible image structures. This can be seen in the distribution of pixels, their least signicant bits (LSBs), or the coefcients of the discrete cosine transform (DCT). There is signicant variation in texture, color, and contrast variance in natural images, given the range of physical structures that they represent. This variation presents a challenge to steganalysis, especially where steps have been taken to ensure minimal changes to the statistical structure of the cover image. For example, data can be encoded into a single color layer inside a bitmap or pixels can be randomly modied using a seed that is exchanged out-of-band, making the new variation take on the same distribution as the noise present in any image. In steganalytic terms, while it is possible to measure the randomness in the LSB of an image using the 2 test [Westeld 2001], it is not always possible to distinguish between noise from an imperfect optical sensor, or the reduction process of a lossy compression, and variation resulting from the embedding of hidden information. The difculty with using statistical steganalysis was recently demonstrated by Provos and Honeyman [2001] in a study where two million images were downloaded from the eBay website and examined for deviations in statistical structure. They found that some 17,000 or around 1.7% of images had characteristics consistent with modication (steganographic or otherwise). However, while the study devoted enormous computing power, it was not possible to determine the encoding method used to encode messages inside the potential cover images. Thus, steganography using natural images appears to be highly resilient to statistical analysis. 2.2 Visual Steganalysis

Since humans have sophisticated pattern-recognition capabilities that are optimized for natural images [Barlow 1961], one possibility is that they will be superior to other techniques. Although the statistical models underlying pattern recognition in human vision are still being investigated [Watters 2003a], the human visual system is optimized to process data contained within natural images [Field 1987]. There are two forms of visual steganalysis, one in which the cover image is known (the known cover form of analysis) and one form where it is not. We can replicate both of these scenarios
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experimentally by using same/different and yes/no visual judgment tasks. Where the cover image is unknown, the task of steganography is difcult, as the human judge has no reference for discriminating a signal (the presence of steganography) from noise. However, in known cover visual steganalysis, a human judge makes a judgment when confronted with the original cover image and a possibly embedded test image, which resembles a same/different judgement task (for a review, see Farell [1985]). Irregularities in the LSB distribution may be easily recognized by an observer, even if the cover image contains a lot of random variation. Since digital imaging systems are less perfect than their analog counterparts, distortions in cover images resulting from steganographic encoding may be recognizable. Another methodological advantage of framing visual steganalysis as a perceptual judgment task is that signal-detection theory can be used to determine the discriminability of steganographically encoded cover images. Judges can either (a) correctly detect the presence of steganography in the target image (hit); (b) correctly detect the absence of steganography in the target image (correct rejection); (c) incorrectly detect the presence of steganography in the target image when there was none (false alarm); or (d) incorrectly detect the absence of steganography in the target image when it was, in fact, present (miss). These measures can be combined to compute discriminability measures, such as d [Brophy 1986]. Given the possibility that human observation may succeed where statistical analysis has not been successful, this study used simple, single-layer embedding across the eight different color layers individually, to determine if there was any relationship between discriminability and the bit layer used. This is important, since changes to higher bit layers will have a greater numerical impact on the color values in the image compared to lower bit layers. Basic substitution approaches to natural image steganography encode secret information by replacing insignicant parts of the original image with parts of the secret message. The receiver has to have knowledge of the position of the secret information to be able to extract the hidden message. It is assumed that a passive attacker will not recognize these modications, since the changes made are rather minor. LSB substitution approaches are common in steganography and relatively easy to apply in images. A surprising amount of information can be hidden with little, if any, impact to the carriers. The embedding process consists of choosing a subset of cover elements and performing a substitution operation on them [Katzenbeisser and Petitcolas 2000]. In this operation, the LSB of the original images is replaced with a bit of the secret message. This algorithm can be extended by replacing more then one bit of the original image or by storing two message bits in each cover byte, for instance. Another extension involves distributing the bits over the image and not substituting each LSB bit, but every second, third, or by following a pseudorandom pattern. In the extraction process, the LSBs of the cover elements are extracted and lined up to reconstruct the secret message. In order to decode the embedded message, the receiver must know the sequence of the element indices used in the embedding process, which would be agreed on out-of-band. In the simplest case, the message is embedded in all elements of the original image and each LSB is modied. However, since the length of the secret message must not match the amount of available space, only parts of the original image are used. If the statistical difference between the part of the image that information was embedded in and the unused part is signicant an embedded message may be easily detected. To avoid this problem, two approaches have been introduced. The public domain program PGMStealth [Rinne 2000], for example, packs the secret message with a set of random characters so that the length of the message matches the amount of available cover space. A more sophisticated approach is the use of a pseudorandom number generator (PRG), which produces the same sequence of random numbers when it is initialized with the same seed value. The distance between the embedded bits is determined by the sequence of random numbers produced by the generator. If a stego-key that is
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known by the sender and receiver initializes this PRG, the same sequence of random numbers is used in the embedding and extraction process and the message can be extracted. Again, the seed could be exchanged out-of-band to ensure condentiality. The most basic approach in the domain of LSB techniques is to substitute each least-signicant bit with a bit of the embedded message. In theory, this approach should be quite easy to recognize with a visual attack on the modied bit layer, since the randomness that is introduced by the embedding module is normally higher than the natural variation in an image. In addition, if the same/different paradigm is used to replicate known cover analysis, detection should be straightforward. This experiment aims to directly test the discriminability of single-layer substitution using two paradigms: the same/different paradigm and the yes/no paradigm. It is predicted that human judges will be able to detect steganographically encoded images. 3. METHOD

Two experiments were conducted using a LSB steganographic encoding technique, each in a repeatedmeasures design, where the participants acted as their own controls. Experiment 1 used the same/ different perceptual judgment protocol, while Experiment 2 used the yes/no protocol. The participants were 58 (Experiment 1) and 61 (Experiment 2) healthy third-year undergraduate psychology students from the University of Tasmania, for whom participation in the experiment was a course requirement, and who were randomly assigned to either Experiment 1 or 2. The average age was 23.3 years (SD = 4.56) in the range 2039 years. Their participation was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee (Tasmania) Network. No identifying information about the participants was retained or associated with their results, as each participant was assigned a random session identier from Java HttpSession API. Fifteen images (cropped to 500 500 pixels) were selected from the MIT VisTex image database for display (http://vismod.media.mit.edu/vismod/imagery/VisionTexture/vistex.html). The images selected were bark, brick paint, buildings, corridor, dock cage city, fabric, fence sign, food, grassland, ground water city, leaves, plants sky, prison window, stone, terrain, and valley water. The text of Chaucers Canterbury Tales was encoded in each image using steganographic embedding in the experimental condition. As an example of the effect of steganographic encoding, a 346 461 pixel image, shown in Figure 1, was taken by S. Stripf in Karlsruhe, Germany. It contained a combination of areas with low and high contrast, including the sky and grass, and natural and articial textures, such as trees and buildings, respectively. The sample image was then processed by the StegoKit toolbox [Stripf and Watters 2004] to generate eight test images for each encoding typeone for each bit layer where the steganographic technique had been applied. The sample images generated are shown in Figure 2, where the standard Lena image has been encoded inside the sample image (downloaded from http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/images/lena.jpg). The experiments were performed in an undergraduate student computer lab, using the Tomcat 3.3 Java application server (http://jakarta.apache.org) to execute a Java servlet that was responsible for presenting the data using a web browser (Internet Explorer 6), and recording the participants responses. In Experiment 1, in accordance with the same/different paradigm, the participant was presented with two images on the screen and asked the question Are these images the same or are they different? In 50% of trials, the two images would be identical; in the remaining 50% of trials, the image on the right was encoded using steganography. The original image always appeared on the left, as this correctly replicates the naturalistic setting of law enforcement ofcials being in possession of the known cover prior to examination of possibly steganographically encoded images.
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Fig. 1. Sample image taken at Karlsruhe, Germany.

In Experiment 2, using the yes/no paradigm, the participant was presented with one image on the screen and asked the question Is this a natural image or has it been modied? In 50% of trials, the image would be encoded using steganography. Participants were not informed before the experiment that the images had been specically encoded using steganography. The experiment was double blind and the presentation of target images to each participant was randomized. In both experiments, participants were presented with 15 target images encoded in eight different layers, giving a total of 120 embedded images (the experimental image set), thus, a total of 240 presentations were made, including 120 images, which were not modied (the control image set). No time limit was placed on the examination of the images by the participants and they entered their responses by clicking the appropriate button on the web page generated dynamically by the Java servlet. The client application was Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and all PCs used identical 17 Inch monitors, with 1280 1024 display pixel resolution. Figure 3 shows an example display of what the participant actually saw in Experiment 1. 4. 4.1 RESULTS Experiment 1

Table I shows the hit, miss, false alarm, and correct rejection rates, and the d discriminability and bias (C) measures, averaged over all 15 images [Green and Swets 1966]. The crossover between the miss and hit rates was dened as the layer in which the number of hits exceeded the number of misses, i.e., where the image was recognized at greater than chance level, corresponding to cases where d>1. To recap, if the response was same and this decision was correct, then it is a correct rejection; if the
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Fig. 2. Experimental image set generated from the sample image after encoding the Lena image using the StegoKit toolbox.
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Fig. 3. Sample participant display of the experimental procedure (Experiment 1).

Table I. Signal Detection Analysis: Experiment 1 (N = 58)

Hit Miss CR FA d C Layer 1 4.13 53.88 53.31 4.56 0.07 1.44 Layer 2 4.25 53.75 53.94 4.06 0.00 1.48 Layer 3 11.19 46.81 53.56 4.44 0.53 1.14 Layer 4 26.75 31.25 53.88 4.13 1.38 0.79 Layer 5 44.19 14.44 53.56 4.44 2.11 0.35 Layer 6 53.00 5.00 53.44 4.56 2.75 0.03 Layer 7 56.31 1.69 53.44 6.56 3.11 0.32 Layer 8 56.63 1.38 54.31 3.69 3.61 0.25

response was different and this is correct, then it is a hit. Conversely, if the response is same and it is wrong, then it is a false alarm, and if the response is different, and it is wrong, then it is a miss. The crossover occurred at Layer 4, indicating that the majority of participants could correctly detect the presence of steganography in Layer 4 and above. The percentage of hits increased monotonically from the Layer 4 result leading in a 97% hit rate in Layer 7 and beyond. A regression line was tted with y = 9.17x 9.23, R 2 = 0.93, indicating a strong positive linear relationship between layer number and hit rate, as shown in Figure 4. The correct rejection rate was uniform across all of the layers that the control image set acted as controls for. A regression line was tted with y = 0.05x + 53.47, R 2 = 0.11, indicating a modest linear relationship between layer number and the correct rejection rate, as shown in Figure 5. These results indicate that steganographic encoding is effective against visual attacks in Layers 1, 2, and 3 only. The relationship between layer number and the hit rate was R 2 = 0.97, compared to R 2 = 0.11 for the control condition, indicating a robust experimental effect.
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1.00

0.80

Rate

0.60

Miss Hit

0.40

0.20

0.00

Layer

Fig. 4. Hit and miss rate for steganographic encoding: Experiment 1.

1.00 0.90 0.80 0.70

Rate

0.60 0.50 0.40 0.30 0.20 0.10 0.00 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Correct Reject False Alarm

Layer

Fig. 5. Correct reject and false alarm rate for steganographic encoding: Experiment 1.

In terms of bias (C), there was a strongly negative relationship between C and the layer number, y = 0.29x + 1.90, R 2 = 0.95 (see Table I). This indicated that judgmnts were made using a stricter criterion in the lower layers, while this was relaxed in the upper layersno doubt because of the evident difference between the control image and the experimental image set in the upper layers, as shown in Figure 2. 4.2 Experiment 2

Table II shows the hit, miss, false alarm, and correct rejection rates, and the d discriminability and bias (C) measures. Like Experiment 1, the crossover between d and layer occurred at Layer 4, indicating that the majority of participants could correctly detect the presence of steganography in Layer 4 and above. The percentage of hits increased monotonically from the Layer 4 result, leading to a 97% hit rate in Layer 7 and beyond. A regression line was tted with y = 9.79x 8.77, R 2 = 0.92, indicating a strong positive linear relationship between layer number and hit rate, as shown in Figure 6. The correct rejection rate was uniform across all of the layers that the control image set acted as controls for. A regression line was tted with y = 0.00x + 56.59, R 2 = 0.00, indicating no linear relationship between layer number and the correct rejection rate, as shown in Figure 7.
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P. Watters et al. Table II. Signal-Detection Analysis: Experiment 2 (N = 53)

Miss Hit CR FA d C Layer 1 55.94 5.06 56.56 4.44 0.07 1.44 Layer 2 55.38 5.63 57.06 3.94 0.21 1.44 Layer 3 49.00 12.00 56.50 4.50 0.63 1.16 Layer 4 30.88 30.13 56.13 4.88 1.38 0.72 Layer 5 11.06 49.94 56.94 4.06 2.39 0.35 Layer 6 2.50 58.50 56.25 4.75 3.16 0.17 Layer 7 0.69 60.31 56.75 4.25 3.8 0.43 Layer 8 0.25 60.75 56.88 4.13 5.77 1.41

1.20

1.00

0.80

Rate

0.60

Miss Hit

0.40

0.20

0.00

Layer

Fig. 6. Hit and miss rate for steganographic encoding: Experiment 2.

1.00 0.90 0.80 0.70

Rate

0.60 0.50 0.40 0.30 0.20 0.10 0.00 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Correct Reject False Alarm

Layer

Fig. 7. Correct reject and false alarm rate for steganographic encoding: Experiment 2.

These results indicate that steganographic encoding is effective against visual attacks in Layers 1, 2, and 3 only. The relationship between layer number and the hit rate was R 2 = 0.92, compared to R 2 = 0.00 for the control condition, indicating a robust experimental effect. In terms of bias (C), there was a strongly negative relationship between C and the layer number, y = 0.40x + 2.19, R 2 = 0.95 (see Table II). Like Experiment 1, this indicated that judgments were made using a stricter criterion in the lower layers, while this was relaxed in the upper layers.
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5.

DISCUSSION

The results of this experiment can be easily summarized: steganography is resistant to visual attacks in Layers 1, 2, and 3 only, but can be readily detected in higher layers. This effect was evident across two different methodologies for perceptual judgements, averaged across 15 different natural scenes. Also, in Layer 1 of Experiment 1, participants saw an encoded hidden message inside an image when there was no hidden message at all, more often than they did not see a message when it was actually there. The fact that error rates are higher than correct detection probably reects the fact that the participants were not trained image analysts. In some way, the algorithm encoding the hidden data is making the experimental images look more natural than the unmodied controls. This effect was not replicated in Experiment 2this reects the operational preference of known cover analysis (Experiment 1), where the observer has a control image to make a comparison with a target image. If the ndings are straightforward, then the implications of the study are more subtle: if untrained image analysts can detect encoding in the higher bitmap layers (Layers 48), then these should never be used in steganographic systems. Conversely, since encoding in the lower bitmap layers (Layers 1, 2, and 3) was resistant to visual attack with this technique, utilizing these layers makes it very difcult to detect the presence of steganography. This should be of great concern to those people devising steganalytic techniques and applying them in practice. If low-capacity steganography was used, then presumably the presence of concealed messages would be even more difcult to detect. In this study, only undergraduate university volunteers were used as the judges; the ideal visual steganalytic test would involve using fully trained image analysts as judges, to see if the results could be improved. Given the relatively low false alarm rate for these untrained analysts, this would further decrease if trained image analysts undertook the same task. Further work is required to investigate how visual steganalysis can exploit the characteristics of encoded images. In practical terms, the results present a challenge to intelligence agencies and others who review suspicious images, since they are likely to miss encoded images in Layers 13 using steganographic encoding. Thus, further work is required to determine the key factors improving the success of detection by visual inspection alone, perhaps in combination with a pattern recognition system. In this study, we observed that known cover analysis resulted in fewer errors than where the cover was not available for inspection by the participant. Furthermore, there are a number of different algorithms, developed by Lee and Chen [1999, 2003] that go well beyond the simple encoding used in this study. For example, some algorithms encode data into several different layers, to increase the effective steganographic storage capacity of the cover. There is a well-known relationship between capacity, robustness, and recognizability [Rosenbaum 2000], which needs to be accounted for in future experiments. The question is whether or not these algorithms would increase or decrease the discriminability of the cover image. In this study, 15 images with a combination of natural and articial textures were used. To achieve better experimental control, it would be best to extend the repeated-measures design to other images, or to use articially generated images with known texture, luminance distribution, etc. However, since the reported use of steganography by terrorists was through natural images, it is equally important to maintain the ecological validity of these experiments. Given the current scientic interest in the statistical properties of natural images [Olshausen and Field 2004] and the models that describe them [Watters 2003b], it would be more realistic to use a wide range of natural images with different texture types, pixel luminance, and color distributions. This is an active area of investigation.
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