Forensic analysis of video steganography tools
Forensic analysis of video steganography tools
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DOI：
10.7717/peerj-cs.7
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发表时间：
2015-05-01
影响因子：
3.8
通讯作者：
Hernandez-Castro, Julio
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Sloan, Thomas;Hernandez-Castro, Julio
隐写术是一门隐藏信息的艺术和科学，只有消息的发送者和预期接收者才能意识到它的存在。数字隐写术在过去已经被用于各种媒体，包括可执行文件、音频、文本、游戏，特别是图像。此外，有越来越多的研究兴趣对使用视频作为媒体的隐写术，由于其无处不在的性质和不同的嵌入能力。在这项工作中，我们研究了嵌入算法和其他安全特性的几个视频隐写工具。我们展示了所有功能的基本和严重的安全漏洞。这可能对用户的安全、隐私和匿名性构成非常严重的威胁。需要强调的是，大多数隐写术用户都有充分的法律的和道德的理由来使用它。一些常见的场景包括言论自由受到损害的压迫政权中的公民，试图避免大规模监视或审查的人，政治活动家，告密者，记者等。根据我们的调查结果，我们强烈建议停止使用这些工具，并删除任何可能已被隐藏的内容以及任何在线存储、交换和/或上传的载体。对于许多这些工具，载体文件将是微不足道的检测，可能会危及任何隐藏的数据和通信中涉及的各方。我们完成这项工作，提出我们的隐写分析结果，突出了一个非常贫穷的当前状态的艺术在实际的视频隐写工具。不幸的是，完全缺乏安全和公开可用的工具，即使是商业工具也提供非常差的安全性。因此，我们鼓励隐写术社区努力开发更安全和更易于访问的视频隐写工具，并将其提供给公众。在这项工作中提出的结果也可以被看作是一个有用的资源，法医检查员，以确定存在的任何视频隐写材料的过程中的计算机法医调查。
Steganography is the art and science of concealing information in such a way that only the sender and intended recipient of a message should be aware of its presence. Digital steganography has been used in the past on a variety of media including executable files, audio, text, games and, notably, images. Additionally, there is increasing research interest towards the use of video as a media for steganography, due to its pervasive nature and diverse embedding capabilities. In this work, we examine the embedding algorithms and other security characteristics of several video steganography tools. We show how all feature basic and severe security weaknesses. This is potentially a very serious threat to the security, privacy and anonymity of their users. It is important to highlight that most steganography users have perfectly legal and ethical reasons to employ it. Some common scenarios would include citizens in oppressive regimes whose freedom of speech is compromised, people trying to avoid massive surveillance or censorship, political activists, whistle blowers, journalists, etc. As a result of our findings, we strongly recommend ceasing any use of these tools, and to remove any contents that may have been hidden, and any carriers stored, exchanged and/or uploaded online. For many of these tools, carrier files will be trivial to detect, potentially compromising any hidden data and the parties involved in the communication. We finish this work by presenting our steganalytic results, that highlight a very poor current state of the art in practical video steganography tools. There is unfortunately a complete lack of secure and publicly available tools, and even commercial tools offer very poor security. We therefore encourage the steganography community to work towards the development of more secure and accessible video steganography tools, and make them available for the general public. The results presented in this work can also be seen as a useful resource for forensic examiners to determine the existence of any video steganography materials over the course of a computer forensic investigation.