AES Inspired Hex Symbols Steganography for Anti-Forensic Artifacts on Android Devices

Abstract

—Mobile phones technology has become one of the most common and important technologies that started as a communication tool and then evolved into key reservoirs of personal information and smart applications. With this increased level of complications, increased dangers and increased levels of countermeasures and opposing countermeasures have emerged, such as Mobile Forensics and anti-forensics. One of these anti- forensics tools is steganography, which introduced higher levels of complexity and security against hackers’ attacks but simultaneously create obstacles to forensic investigations. In this paper we proposed a new data hiding approach, the AES Inspired Steganography (AIS), which utilizes some AES data encryption concepts while hiding the data using the concept of hex symbols steganography. As the approach is based on the use of multiple encryption steps, the resulting carrier files would be unfathomable without the use of the cipher key agreed upon by the communicating parties. These carrier files can be exchanged amongst android devices and/or computers. Assessments of the proposed approach have proven it to be advantageous over the currently existing steganography approaches in terms of character frequency, security, robustness, length of key, and Compatibility.