CAPStego A Project on Steganography
ABSTRACT
The word steganography comes from the Greek word steganos, meaning covered or secret, and graphy, meaning writing or drawing. Therefore, steganography literally means covered writing. "Steganography differs from encryption in that encryption disguises the content of a message, whereas steganography disguises the existence of a message." Encryption takes a message and translates it using a code. An encrypted message appears to a viewer as a bunch of gibberish, thus making it clear to the viewer that he/she is looking at an encrypted message. One would need the code to return the encrypted message into its original form. However, if steganography has been used on a message, the viewer would not be able to tell that the message contains a hidden message within it. To use another childhood example, the writing of a message using invisible ink would constitute steganography. If you knew that a piece of paper had an invisible message on it, you could uncover the message using specific tools; otherwise, you would think you were looking at a blank piece of paper. In other words, steganography means establishing covert channels. A covert channel is a secret communication channel used for transmitting information. Two general directions can be distinguished within steganography: protection against detection and protection against removal. Protection against detection is achieved using schemes that do not modify in a visible way the original unmarked object; the modifications are not visible by the humans or by the computers. Protection against removal supposes that the scheme should be robust to common attacks; it is impossible to remove the hidden data without degrading the objects quality and rendering it useless. Generally, a steganographic message will appear to be something else: a picture, an article, a shopping list, or some other message. This apparent message is the covertext. For instance, a message may be hidden by using invisible ink between the visible lines of innocuous documents.
INTRODUCTION
We present software CAPStego based on steganographic techniques to hide information in an image or an audio file. Let us give a brief overview of the whole software. We will not discuss about the coding, forms, modules and technologies used to build the soft-ware here. Here we will concentrate on the general working of the software. After installing the software when it is run a splash screen appears on the screen of the user and lasts for 10 seconds. This screen shows the name of the software and its version. When the splash screen disappears a window will appear on the screen of the user. This window will contain two buttons. The top button is named Image Steganography and the bottom button is named Sound Steganography. As the user can perceive, these buttons leads to the two different facilities that the software provides. The user should click on the image steganography button if he/she wants to hide a message in an image. Similarly the user should click on the sound steganography button if he/she wants to hide the message in a sound file. The two approaches used in our project is : The first approach, protection against detection, can be illustrated using the Prisoners Problem The second approach, protection against removal, is used for document marking, for embedding information about the author or for embedding a serial number; in other words, copyright information.
There is a difference between the two approaches discussed above: in the Prisoners Problem a successful attack consists in finding out that a given object is marked, finding out that the two prisoners communicate. In the latter approach, watermarking, a successful attack consists in detecting the watermark and rendering it useless, in other words to detect and to extract the watermark. As a result, in some cases the data inserted should be robust to attacks
Generally, a steganographic message will appear to be something else: a picture, an article, a shopping list, or some other message. This apparent message is the covertext. For instance, a message may be hidden by using invisible ink between the visible lines of innocuous documents. Steganography used in electronic communication include steganographic coding inside of a transport layer, such as a file, or a protocol, such as UDP. Usually, files meant for Internet means are put into media types that are lossless, such as FLAC, WAV, PNG etc.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
C# DotNet Platform :
C# is a highly interactive programming language. It has several features that allow the programmer to develop applications for Microsoft windows as well as web based applications in an easy and efficient manner. The DotNet environment increases the productivity of the programmer by providing the tools necessary to develop extremely sophisticated applications. DotNet realizes very heavily on the Windows graphical user interface. Therefore the only prerequisite to work in DotNet environment is to have a firm understanding of Mouse, Windows, Pull down Menu and Dialog Boxes. DotNet as a Platform : DotNet serves very well as a platform independent technology along with that it provides the right environment for building applications in a number of languages such as C#, J#, Visual Basic, Visual C++ etc. It has a Common Language Runtime (CLR) that serves as a common interface for the various application building languages. It supports the compilers of a number of different languages which compiles their respective codes into this common interface CLR. This is very much like the Byte code in Java. Since this is a common interface it lends platform independent features. This CLR is finally converted into object code by the specific computer. DotNet as a Framework : DotNet serves as a highly efficient framework for development of applications as it provides the user with a number of tools for building windows based applications or web based applications simply by Drag and Drop process. Its provides a very large set of tools that are required by developers to develop a good web based or windows based application whether it is needed to create a small utility for you or work group, a large enterprise-wide system, or even distributed
applications spanning the globe via the Internet, DotNet has the tools needed. Data access features allows creating databases, front-end applications, and scalable server-side components for most popular database formats, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and other enterpriselevel databases. ActiveX technologies allow us to use the functionality provided by other applications, such as Microsoft-Word word processor, Microsoft-Excel spreadsheet, and other Windows applications. Applications can even be automated and objects created using the Professional or Enterprise editions of Visual Basic.
HARDWARE & SOFTWARE SPECIFICATIONS
The hardwares specifications for the CAPStego software are used as follows. Specifications: Space taken : This software takes less than 2 MB of the space.
Minimum System Requirements: Processor
600 MHz processor Recommended: 1 gigahertz (GHz) processor 192 MB Recommended: 256 MB 800 X 600, 256 colors Recommended: 1024 X 768, High Color 16-bit 80 Giga Byte.
RAM
Display
Hard Disk
: :
Monitor Software Requirements:
Color.
Operating System Support :
Windows 2000 Service Pack4, Windows XP Service Pack2
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 Windows Vista. For a 64-bit computer, the requirements are as follows: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 x64 editions Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Software : Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Software Support
INNOVATIONS AND USEFULNESS
CAPStego version 1.0 successfully hides information in an image or a sound file and extracts the same from the image or the sound file. Now let us talk about the fields in which innovations can be made. First of all the version 1.0 of CAPStego provides methods for image and sound steganography. It does not provide any method to hide information in a video or a document. We can provide facilities for hiding information in a document or a video. Secondly, CAPStego version 1.0 does not provide facilities for recording a sound and then hiding message in it. It may contain facilities for recording the sound too. Now let us talk about innovations in the methods used to hide the information. There are many methods to hide the information but for CAPStego version 1.0 we have used only LSB method to hide the information. We can also exploit other methods for hiding the information. Also the type of method used to hide information depends on many aspects CAPStego can be used with BMP, PNG, TIF files for image steganography and WAV (waveform audio format) files for sound steganography. It is possible to broaden the scope of the next version in terms of the files (image/sound) that can be used to hide information like JPEG, GIF, .wma, .mp3 etc.
There are many innovations that can be made to the CAPStego to make it successful and useful when it comes to image and sound steganography.