Intra-Steganography: Hiding Data in High-Resolution Videos

Steganography is the art of hiding information within a file like an image or a video. The embedded message can then be used either to transmit some secret information or to protect the content of the file. Due to the increase of the resolutions to provide higher quality in videos, it is critical to comply with the latest video standard, namely: the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which allows reducing the size of the file to be transmitted. Thus, in this paper we propose an HEVC-compliant method to hide and retrieve information in high-resolution videos. The procedure is based on modifying the luminance of certain blocks. Nevertheless, this must be carefully done, as the HEVC standard is a powerful attack in itself, since it compresses 50% the size of the video on average and the embedded information may disappear. In this paper there is a study evaluating a proper spot to embed the information. Results show that it is possible to retrieve all the information while maintaining the quality of the video after embedding the message. Several tests have been run with the reference software HM-16.2 as well as the real-time encoder x265, and the SSIM and PSNR values are coherent with these theses.