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Steganography by synthesis: Can commonplace image manipulations like face morphing create plausible steganographic channels?

Published: 27 August 2018 Publication History

Abstract

From the three basic paradigms to implement steganography, the concept to realise the information hiding by modifying preexisting cover objects (i.e. steganography by modification) is by far dominating the scientific work in this field, while the other two paradigms (steganography by cover selection or -synthesis) are marginalised although they inherently create stego objects that are closer to the statistical properties of unmodified covers and therefore would create better (i.e. harder to detect) stego channels. Here, we revisit the paradigm of steganography by synthesis to discuss its benefits and limitations on the example of face morphing in images as an interesting synthesis method.
The reason to reject steganography by modification as no longer suitable lies in the current trend of steganography being used in modern day malicious software (malware) families like StuxNet, Duqu or Duqu 2. As a consequence, we discuss here the resulting shift in detection assumptions from cover-only- to cover-stegoattacks (or even further) automatically rendering even the most sophisticated steganography by modification methods useless.
In this paper we use the example of face morphing to demonstrate the necessary conditions1 'undetectability' as well as 'plausibility and indeterminism' for characterizing suitable synthesis methods. The widespread usage of face morphing together with the content dependent, complex nature of the image manipulations required and the fact that it has been established that morphs are very hard to detect, respectively keep apart from other (assumedly innocent) image manipulations assures that it can successfully fulfil these necessary conditions. As a result it could be used as a core for driving steganography by synthesis schemes inherently resistant against cover-stego-attacks.

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  • (2023)A unique database synthesis technique for coverless data hidingJournal of Visual Communication and Image Representation10.1016/j.jvcir.2023.10391196(103911)Online publication date: Oct-2023
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  • (2023)An improved location mapping and cover synthesis based data hiding by model SSSP problem generationMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-023-14681-x82:19(29255-29281)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2023
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  1. Steganography by synthesis: Can commonplace image manipulations like face morphing create plausible steganographic channels?

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    ARES '18: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
    August 2018
    603 pages
    ISBN:9781450364485
    DOI:10.1145/3230833
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 27 August 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. Steganography by synthesis
    2. face morphing attacks
    3. steganography and modern cyber-attacks

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 228 of 451 submissions, 51%

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    View all
    • (2023)A unique database synthesis technique for coverless data hidingJournal of Visual Communication and Image Representation10.1016/j.jvcir.2023.10391196(103911)Online publication date: Oct-2023
    • (2023)A Two Fold Secure Cover Synthesis Based Data Hiding Approach by Generating SequencesWireless Personal Communications10.1007/s11277-023-10653-4132:2(1193-1223)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2023
    • (2023)An improved location mapping and cover synthesis based data hiding by model SSSP problem generationMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-023-14681-x82:19(29255-29281)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2023
    • (2021)Low Visual Distortion and Robust Morphing Attacks Based on Partial Face Image ManipulationIEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science10.1109/TBIOM.2020.30220073:1(72-88)Online publication date: Jan-2021

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