Multimedia Security, Volume 1

5Steganography: Embedding Data Into Multimedia Content

Patrick BAS¹, Rémi COGRANNE² and Marc CHAUMONT³

¹ CRIStAL, CNRS, University of Lille, France

² LIST3N, University of Technology of Troyes, France

³ LIRMM, Université de Montpellier, CNRS, University of Nîmes, France

This chapter presents the basic concepts in steganography. These concepts most often use digital images as a medium, but many of them can be applied to other content coming from sensors, such as sounds or videos. After a reminder of the theoretical foundations linked to steganography, we will present the fundamental principles of the field and then detail the basic methods, using image in its spatial format¹ or JPEG².

The second part of this chapter will present more advanced concepts in steganography; these concepts either allow an increase in the security, or take other practical contexts into account (e.g. the steganography of a group of images, steganography of color images or the use of a high-resolution image during embedding).

5.1. Introduction and theoretical foundations

Steganography seeks to modify the content of a document (most commonly called a “cover” document) in order to embed a message that is undetectable, by producing a steganographied document called a “stego”. The practical context of the use of steganography, presented in Simmons (1984) as “The Prisoners’ Problem”, is presented as follows: Alice seeks to transmit sensitive information to Bob over a benign communication channel (e.g. sending ...