Present theories and practices:

The scientific study of Steganography in the open literature began in 1983 when Simmons stated the problem in terms of communication in a prison. In his formulation, two inmates, Alice and Bob, are trying to hatch an escape plan. The only way they can communicate with each other is through a public channel, which is carefully monitored by the warden of the prison, Ward. If Ward detects any encrypted messages or codes, he will throw both Alice and Bob into solitary confinement. The problem of Steganography is, then: how can Alice and Bob cook up an escape plan by communicating over the public channel in such a way that Ward doesnt suspect anything / unusual is going on.. In particular, this is pointed out that it was unclear how to prove the security of a Steganography protocol, and give an example. They also asked whether it would be possible to have Steganography without a secret key. Finally, they point out that while it is easy to give a loose upper bound on the rate at which hidden bits can be embedded in innocent objects, there was no known lower bound. Since the paper of Anderson and Petitcolas, several works have addressed information-theoretic definitions of Steganography. Cachins work [8,9] formulates the problem as that of designing an encoding function so that the relative entropy between stegotexts, which encode hidden information independently, identically distributed samples from some innocent-looking cover-text probability distribution, is small. He gives a construction similar to one we describe, but concludes that it is computationally intractable; and another construction which is provably secure bet relies critically on the assumption that all orderings of covertexts are equally likely. Cachin also points out several laws in other published information-theoretic formulations of Steganography are severely limited, however, because it is easy to show that informationtheoretically secure Steganography implies information-theoretically secure encryption; thus any secure stegosystem with N bits of secret key can encode at most N hidden bits. In addition, techniques such as public-key Steganography and robust Steganography are information-theoretically impossible.

Proposed methodology:

This thesis initiates the study of steganography from a cryptographic point of view. We propose a precise tool for steganography as shown in next figure, a rigorous definition definition of steganographic security with advanced encryption protocols, and also prove the same relative to a channel.

The steganography tool deals with hiding a text encrypt in the pixels of an image in true colour by means of imperceptible changes to the human eye in the colour. The function hidetc, hides the text in the image; in an interactive way. The image(24 bits is selected) and the text (txt) that can be in any portfolio of the computer. It requests us a password and encrypts it (a word of up to 24 letters). The function to recover the hidden text is seektc, which decrypts the given password. The following steps are a group of steganography tools which will be used to hide it and files of text in an image. The image can be in true colour (24 bits) or in scale of grey (256 ranges of grey). The selection of the image or the text file is made in a completely interactive way. To hide a text, it requires a key word of up to 24 letters (it nails approximate of 115 bits). The function is hidetc to hide the text in the image and seektc to recover the same one. The process of hiding and extracting the text file can be best explained with the help of the following block diagram.

A Steganography System

Hiding Messages

Extracting messages

Here, the odd coefficients of the image matrix (cover file) are added to the ASCII characters of the text file (Message file), and then converted to binary numbers. Prior to this, the text is already encrypted, disordering its lines and columns with the algorithm ranpermut. In this algorithm, functions desordtext and key expansion are used. The function key expansion is used to expand the key of 56 bits in to key of approximately 115 bits. The concealment process produces an imperceptible modification in the image (to colour in to range of 256 for each colour or one in to range of 256 for an image in scale of grey). The key to recover the hidden file in image is stegano-password.

Scope of the work:

Three general directions will arise from this result: 1. High-rate steganography A universal block wise stegosystem with bounded sample access to a channel, the optimal rate is bounded above by both the minimum entropy of the channel and the logarithm of the sample bound. Three general directions arise from this result. First what happens to this bound if we remove the universality and blockwise constraints. A second natural direction to pursue is the question of efficiently detecting the use of a stegosystem that exceeds the maximum secure rate. A third interesting question to explore is the relationship between extractors and stegosystems. 2. Public Key Steganography Steganographic key exchange protocols can be constructed based on intractability assumptions other than the Decisional Dife-Hellman assumption. This is in contrast to cryptographic key exchange, which is implied by the existence of any public-key encryption scheme or oblivious transfer protocol. 3. Active attacks Concerning steganography in the presence of active attacks, several questions remain open. Some standard cryptographic questions remain about chosen-covertext security, and substitution-robust steganography. A more important issue is a model of a disrupting adversary which more closely models the type of attacks applied to existing proposals in the literature for robust stegosystems.

References:
[1] G. Aggarwal, N. Mishra and B. Pinkas. Secure computation of the kth-ranked element to appear in advances in Cryptology { Proceedings of Eurocrypt 04, 2004. [2] Luis von Ahn and Nicholas J. Hopper. Public-Key Steganography. Submitted to crypto 2003. [3] L. von Ahn and N. Hopper. Public-Key Steganography. To appear in Advances in Cryptology { Proceedings of Eurocrypt 04, 2004. [4] Ross J. Anderson and Fabien A.P. Petitcolas. On the Limits of Steganography. IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications, 16(4). May 1998. [5] Ross J. Anderson and Fabien A.P. Petitcolas. Stretching the Limits of Steganography. In: Proceedings of the first International Information Hiding Workshop. 1996. [6] J. Brassil, S. Low, N.F. Maxemchuk, and L.OGorman. Hiding Information in Documents Images. In: Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, 1995. [7] M. Blum and S. Goldwasser. An Efficient Probabilistic Public-Key Encryption Scheme which Hides All Partial Information. Advances in Cryptology: CRYPTO 84, Springer LNCS 196, pages 289-302, 1985. [8] C. Cachin. An Information-Theoretic Model for Steganography. In: Information Hiding { Second International Wrokshop, Preproceedings. April 1998. [9] C. Cachin. An Information-Theoretic Model for Steganography. In: Information and Computation 192(1): pages 41 { 56, July 2004. [10] G. Jagpal. Steganography in Digital Images Thesis, Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, May 1995. [11] Stefan Katzenbeisser and Fabien A. P. Petitcolas. Information hiding techniques for steganography and digital watermarking. Artech House Books, 1999. [12] T. Van Le. Efficient Provably Secure Public Key Steganography IACR e-print archive report 2003/156, 2003.