Implementation of Steganographic Techniques

Danny Friedheimpd. 2

Background

➲ Steganography - the existence of the message is unknown

➲ as opposed to Cryptography - the existence of the message is clear, but it is unreadable

➲ building on existing research in the field

Purpose

➲ to hide data in a WAVE file

➲ make data statistically undetectable

➲ extract hidden message with same program

Tools

➲ programming languages: C++

➲ algorithms: original work by me for this purpose, implementing the “least significant bit” substitution method

Procedures/Methods

➲ program's methods controlled via command-line arguments

➲ -i (insert) inserts message into WAVE header (or -i2)

➲ -x (extract) finds message in header and displays it (or -x2)

Procedures

➲ algorithm inserts each character of message into least significant bytes of actual sound data

➲ increases file size by very little, so hard to detect

➲ changes are undetectable by human ear

Analysis/Tests

➲ listening to files and seeing whether a difference is evident

➲ file sizes confirm that no data has been lost at this stage

Final Results

➲ I can successfully insert a message into the WAVE file data and retrieve it later

➲ can also add whole text files with the -f flag

➲ file size only increases by 4 bytes (int containing length of message)

Sample Output

➲ Note that the message is successfully written to “output3.wav” and then extracted. Also, the file size increase between the original (“breakbeat.wav”) and the output file is only 4 bytes (an int containing the length of the message).

Larger Purpose

➲ real-world applications in covert operations and communication

➲ undetectable steganographic algorithm – huge breakthrough