Backpack: A Backpropagable Adversarial Embedding Scheme

A minmax protocol offers a general method to automatically optimize steganographic algorithm against a wide class of steganalytic detectors. The quality of the resulting steganograhic algorithm depends on the ability to find an “adversarial” stego image undetectable by a set of detectors while communicating a given message. Despite minmax protocol instantiated with ADV-EMB scheme leading to unexpectedly good results, we show it suffers a significant flaw and we present a theoretically sound solution called Backpack. Extensive experimental verification of minmax protocol with Backpack shows superior performance to ADV-EMB, the generality of the tool by targeting a new JPEG QF100 compatibility attack and further improves the security of steganographic algorithms.