Towards Construction Based Data Hiding: From Secrets to Fingerprint Images (nonfiction)
Towards Construction Based Data Hiding: From Secrets to Fingerprint Images is a paper by Sheng Li and Xinpeng Zhanga proposing a construction based data hiding technique which transforms a secret message into a fingerprint image.
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (26 October 2018).
Abstract:
Data hiding usually involves the alteration of a cover signal for embedding a secret message. In this paper, we propose a construction based data hiding technique which transforms a secret message into a fingerprint image directly. Unlike the conventional data hiding techniques, this scheme does not need any cover signals to participate. Instead, it generates the fingerprint image based on a piece of hologram phase constructed from the secret message. The hologram phase consists of the spiral phase and the continuous phase. Firstly, we propose to map the secret message to a polynomial and encode it into a set of points with different polarities, from which the spiral phase is computed and constructed. Then, we construct the continuous phase by decomposing a fingerprint image synthetically generated. The spiral phase and the continuous phase are combined to form the hologram phase. This is eventually used to construct a fingerprint image in a common form such as a grayscale fingerprint image, a binary fingerprint image, or a thinned fingerprint image. The secret message can be extracted by detecting the encoded points in the constructed fingerprint. We conduct the experiments by constructing fingerprint images with ordinary sizes, the results show that the secret message can be extracted accurately. It is also difficult to detect the existence of secret message from the constructed fingerprint images.
-- Towards Construction Based Data Hiding: From Secrets to Fingerprint Images
Cory Doctorow writes:
Critically, the fingerprint method described in this paper is resistant to the existing systems for finding steganographically hidden data inside of images, which is very exciting.
But as the paper's authors note, those systems were designed to detect generic information-hiding attempts, and not attempts that use their method to hide information. It may be (and I think it's likely) that a different system, designed with this information hiding technique in mind, could detect hidden data as reliably as other stego-finding tools.
The fingerprint method is also exciting in other respects: it can hold a surprising amount of data and that data can be read even after a significant degradation of the source image.
-- Steganographically hiding secret messages in fake fingerprints
Boing Boing commenter sluggo writes:
So my fingerprints contain the text of every book written and ever will be written, I just need to try different keys.
Neat.
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External links:
- Steganography @ Wikipedia
- Cryptography @ Wikipedia
- How to Encode a Secret Message in a Fingerprint @ IEEE
- Steganographically hiding secret messages in fake fingerprints @ Boing Boing