Detection of steganographic messages in email attachment

Abstract

Steganography is defined as the art and science of hiding message in a communication medium. The ease of use in steganography and the ability to make detecting steganography files difficult have led to the rise in their use in the Internet as one of a secret communication between two parties. There is also a fear that terrorist organisations are using similar technology to secretly communicate with one another. Email that contains the files embedded with hidden information using steganography can be very difficult to detect. One possible way to overcome this problem is by running a detection system that would analyse for any steganographic message which has been sent through email within the network. This paper presents a steganography detection system which captures all the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) transactions that has been established to an email server. It then runs a steganography test in order to detect steganographic message in images files attached to a particular email. Once detected and stored to a database, the system will then extract the hidden message to reveal the message.