Blind consistency-based steganography for information hiding in digital media

We propose a new approach to steganography for information hiding in digital media. We refer to it as blind consistency-based steganography (BCBS). Our main concerns in designing BCBS is high imperceptibility, high security level, and large capacity. Steganography differs from digital watermarking because both the information and the very existence of the information are hidden. Even though the discussion focuses on digital images, BCBS can be applied to any digital media. While existing steganographic approaches all have different advantages for specific applications, they also suffer a similar problem: such systems are unable to handle subterfuge attacks, i.e., they cannot deal with the opponents who not only detect a message, but also render it useless, or even worse, modify it to the opponent's favor. The breakthrough of BCBS is that it not only decodes the message exactly, it also detects if the message has been tampered without using any extra error correction. The detection is integrated into the process of decoding. Another advantage of BCBS is the "blindness" of the decoding process, meaning the decoding can be operated without access to the cover image. The encoding and decoding process are detailed in the paper, along with the analysis on imperceptibility, security, and capacity. Experimental results are provided as well.