Steganography is a science which is interested in communication hiding. This work is focused on the most recent methods related to this topic. Mainly, it is matrix embedding, which uses coding theory, and sum and difference covering sets (SDCS). Rainbow coloring of grid graphs is used to receive even better results. This technique decrease amplitude of performed changes. It makes stegosystems less likely to be detected. Properties which describe behavior of each stegosystem are included for each technique. 1

La stéganographie est l'art de la communication secrète. L'objectif est de dissimuler un message secret dans un médium anodin de sorte qu'il soit indétectable. De nos jours, avec la généralisation d'Internet et l'apparition des supports numériques (fichiers audio, vidéos ou images), plusieurs philosophies de conception de schéma stéganographique ont été proposées. Parmi les méthodes actuelles appliquées aux images numériques naturelles, nous trouvons les méthodes d'insertion adaptative, dont le principe repose sur la modification du médium de couverture avec une garantie d'avoir un certain niveau de sécurité. Ces méthodes représentent une véritable avancée en stéganographie.Dans ce manuscrit, après avoir rappelé les concepts récents de stéganographie adaptative, nous présentons une procédure automatique et complète pour l'insertion adaptative de données secrètes dans des images numériques naturelles. L'approche proposée est une « méta-méthode » basée « oracle », appelée ASO (Adaptive Steganography by Oracle), qui permet de préserver à la fois la distribution de l'image de couverture et la distribution de la base d'images utilisée par l'émetteur. Notre approche permet d'obtenir des résultats nettement supérieurs aux méthodes actuelles de l'état de l'art, et est donc l'une, si ce n'est la meilleure approche du moment. Par ailleurs, nous définissons également un nouveau paradigme en stéganographie qui est la stéganographie par base, ainsi qu'une nouvelle mesure de sélection pour les images stéganographiées, permettant d'améliorer encore plus les performances de notre schéma d'insertion. Les différentes expérimentations, que nous avons effectuées sur des images réelles, ont confirmé la pertinence de cette nouvelle approche. / Steganography is the art of secret communication. The goal is to hide a secret message in an unsuspicious object in such a way that no one can detect it. Nowadays, with the Internet spread and the emergence of digital supports (audio files, videos, or images), several philosophies of designing steganographic methods were proposed. One of the most usual embedding methods used with real digital images is the adaptive embedding algorithms, which is based on the modification of the cover image with a guarantee of a certain security level. These methods represent an important progress in steganography.In this Ph.D. Thesis, we present a fully automated procedure for the adaptive embedding of secret data in digital images. For this, after recalling the recent concepts of adaptive steganography, we first introduce a clear formalism to define a new "meta-method" steganographic approach based on "oracle", whichwe called ASO (Adaptive Steganography by Oracle). Then, we define a new steganographic paradigm called "the steganography by database paradigm", and propose a new selection criterion to further enhance the security of the transmission phase of ASO. Experimental results show that our embedding approach ASO provides the highest level of steganographic security. It is then currently the best or one of the best approaches of the state of the art.

<p>The option of communicating via SMS messages can be considered available in all GSM networks. It therefore constitutes a almost universally available method for mobile communication.</p><p>The Tiger XS, a device for secure communication manufactured by Sectra, is equipped with an encrypted text message transmission system. As the text message service of this device is becoming increasingly popular and as options to connect the Tiger XS to computers or to a keyboard are being researched, the text message service is in need of upgrade.</p><p>This thesis proposes amendments to the existing protocol structure. It thoroughly examines a number of options for source coding of small text messages and makes recommendations as to implementation of such features. It also suggests security enhancements and introduces a novel form of stegangraphy.</p>

A novel approach for watermarking of 3D models is introduced, for which data is embedded into 3D models, whereas extracted from their projected 2D visual or 2D-plus-depth representations. Such a watermarking system is valuable, since most of the 3D content is being consumed as 2D visual data. Apart from the efficiency of embedding data into 3D models before generation of arbitrary 2D projections, in some use cases, such as free viewpoint video or computer games, 2D content has to be rendered at the client, where watermarking is less secure. In order to achieve this aim, 3D-2D perspective projection invariants, as well as 3D projective invariants are used and utilization of such invariants enables the method to be independent of the viewpoint from which 2D representations are generated. The first method proposed employs a perspective projection invariant to extract hidden data from an arbitrary 2D view of a watermarked 3D model. Data is encoded in the relative positions of six interest points, selection of which requires minimal criteria. Two main problems for such a watermarking system are identified as noise sensitivity of the invariant and repeatability of the interest point detection. By optimizing an objective function considering this sensitivity, the optimal 3D interest point displacements are obtained. Performance of the proposed system is evaluated through simulations on polygonal 3D mesh models and the results strongly indicate that perspective invariant-based watermarking is feasible. As an extenstion for 2D plus depth representation of 3D models, data embedded in 3D models is also detected by combining information in 2D views and range data by utilizing another projective invariant. Finally, the problem of repeatable interest point detection that remain detectable after data embedding, is also examined and a novel method to identify such repeatable interest points is presented. The proposed methods indicate a new direction in watermarking research.

We present a covert side channel that uses the 802.11 MAC rate switching protocol. The covert channel provides a general method to hide communications in an 802.11 LAN. The technique uses a one-time password algorithm to ensure high-entropy randomness of the covert messages. We investigate how the covert side channel affects node throughput in mobile and non-mobile scenarios. We also investigate the covertness of the covert side channel using standardized entropy. The results show that the performance impact is minimal and increases slightly as the covert channel bandwidth increases. We further show that the channel has 100% accuracy with minimal impact on rate switching entropy. Finally, we present two applications for the covert channel: covert authentication and covert WiFi botnets.

The option of communicating via SMS messages can be considered available in all GSM networks. It therefore constitutes a almost universally available method for mobile communication. The Tiger XS, a device for secure communication manufactured by Sectra, is equipped with an encrypted text message transmission system. As the text message service of this device is becoming increasingly popular and as options to connect the Tiger XS to computers or to a keyboard are being researched, the text message service is in need of upgrade. This thesis proposes amendments to the existing protocol structure. It thoroughly examines a number of options for source coding of small text messages and makes recommendations as to implementation of such features. It also suggests security enhancements and introduces a novel form of stegangraphy.

The major topic of this dissertation is how to improve the image quality and application of digital watermarking techniques. Most traditional digital watermarking techniques focus on the development and improvement of embedding algorithm. But fewer people really care about the degradation of the image quality of digital watermarking techniques. Meanwhile, the application of digital watermarking technique seems to be limited in the copyright protection. Therefore, the techniques used to improve the image quality and to expand the application of digital watermarking technique are proposed in this dissertation. The concept of the proposed technique used to improve the image quality of digital watermarking technique is different from the concept of traditional watermarking techniques which directly modify the features of image to embed digital watermark. Dissimilarly, the proposed technique uses the relation between the features to embed the digital watermark. In this way, the probability of modifying the feature can be efficiently reduced. Therefore, the image quality of watermarked image can be improved. Besides, the proposed technique works like a pre-process. The proposed technique can be easily applied to present traditional digital watermarking techniques without changing the original embedding and extracting process. The expansion of digital watermarking techniques application consists of two techniques. The first one uses the digital watermarking technique to provide the ¡§Image Refining¡¨ function for digital images. In the proposed technique, the RS (Reed-Solomon) codes of original image are used as a watermark and are embedded in the original image. The watermarking information can provide the error correction capability while the original image is distorted (refining function). If there is some alterations made to the watermarked image and they are within the error correction capability of the RS parities, the alterations will be corrected by the RS decoding to restore the original image. The second one applies the digital watermarking techniques on the Pay-TV system. Conventional key distribution methods used in Pay-TV system emphasize on the method¡¦s refinement in order to reduce the frequency of the keys distributed over network. The proposed method uses the digital watermarking technique to hide the cryptographic keys into routine encrypted video program without any increasing of video program size for the economy of network bandwidth and degradation in perceptual quality. The purpose of this thesis is to improve the practicability of digital watermarking techniques. The proposed techniques could supplement the incompleteness of the traditional digital watermarking techniques with additional functions and applications. In this way, traditional digital watermarking techniques can not only be used for copyright protection but also be the new choice of resolving problem in the future digital environment.

Since antiquity, steganography has existed in protecting sensitive information against unauthorized unveiling attempts. Nevertheless, digital media’s evolution, reveals that steganography has been used as a tool for activities such as terrorism or child pornography. Given this background, steganalysis arises as an antidote to steganography. Steganalysis can be divided into two main approaches: universal – also called blind – and specific. Specific methods request a previous knowledge of the steganographic technique under analysis. On the other hand, universal methods which can be widely practiced in a variety of algorithms, are more adaptable to real-world applications. Thus, it is necessary to establish even more accurate steganalysis techniques capable of detecting the hidden information coming from the use of diverse steganographic methods. Considering this, a universal steganalysis method specialized in images is proposed. The method is based on the typical steganalysis process, where feature extractors and classifiers are used. The experiments were implemented on different embedding rates and for various steganographic techniques. It turns out that the proposed method succeeds for the most part, providing dignified results on color images and promising results on gray-scale images.

For a long time, information hiding has focused on carriers like images and audio files. A problem with these carriers is that they do not support hiding in new types of network-based services. Nowadays, these services often arise as a consequence of the increasingly demand for higher connection speed to the Internet. By introducing streaming media as a carrier of hidden information, hiding in new network-based services is supported. The main purposes with this thesis are to investigate how information can be hidden in streaming media and how it measures up compared to images and audio files. In order to evaluate the approach, we have developed a prototype and used it as a proof of concept. This prototype hides information in some of the TCP/IP header fields and is used to collect experimental data as well. As reference, measurements have been collected from other available carriers of hidden information. In some cases, the results of these experiments show that the TCP/IP header is a good carrier of information. Its performance is outstanding and well suited for hiding information quickly. The tests showed that the capacity is slightly worse though.

Steganografi är vetenskapen om att dölja kommunikation. Information döljs i bärarobjekt såsom bilder, program, filmer och musik. För att dölja information i musik kan olika tekniker tillämpas beroende på musikfilens format. Den här studien beskriver musikalisk steganografi i allmänhet, men särskilt fokus ägnas åt MIDI-steganografi. MIDI är ett standardprotokoll för musikteknik som används runt om i världen för att skapa musik och göra det tillgängligt för uppspelning. Då ingen allmänt tillgänglig metod för MIDI-steganografi har kunnat hittats (även om det finns metoder beskrivna i litteraturen), syftar studien även till att undersöka hur en algoritm för MIDI-steganografi kan utformas så att metoden tillfredsställer krav på kapacitet och säkerhet. I studien har en metod för att dölja information i musik med hjälp av velocity-värden utformats och evaluerats, varpå metoden bedöms ha kapacitet jämförbar med liknande metoder. I ett hörbarhetstest kan det konstateras att hörbar påverkan på musiken ej kan urskiljas på någon rimlig signifikansnivå vid användandet av metoden, vilket innebär att även ett säkerhetskriterium är uppfyllt. / Steganography is the science of hiding communication. Information is hidden in carrier objects such as images, software, movies and music. To be able to hide information in music, different techniques can be applied depending on the file formats used. This study describes musical steganography in general, but the primary focus of the report is the techniques of MIDI steganography. MIDI is a standard music technology protocol that is used around the world to create music and make it available for listening. Since no publically available method for MIDI steganography has been found (even though there are methods described in the literature), the study also aims to investigate how an algorithm for MIDI steganography can be designed so that it satisfies capacity and security criteria. As part of the study, a method for using velocity values to hide information in music has been designed and evaluated, during which the method is found to have capacity comparable with similar methods. In an audibility test, it is observed that audible impact on the music can not be distinguished at any reasonable significance level, which means that also a security criterion is met.