False and multi-secret steganography in digital images

Abstract

This paper presents the new concepts of multi-secret and false digital image steganography. The main idea of such approaches is to embed in a single container (digital image) more than one message. The hidden secrets are called real and false messages, respectively. The first one contains essential data which are intended to be securely transferred between different parties, the latter is a bait for focusing attention on an unimportant message. This false and multi-secret steganography will be broken when existence of the real message is revealed, it does not matter whether the false message is detected. Such concepts may find many different applications, especially in situations where communication channel between a sender and a receiver is closely monitored and the warden suspects that the steganography is used. In that case it is probable that the transmitted data will be analyzed in a very detailed way. The concepts described in this paper can help to overcome this problem by dropping a fabricated message and thereby deceiving the warden. The possibility of sending both real and false information at the same time can be seen as additional benefit. In fact, the presented idea allows to establish a kind of subliminal channel while transferring hidden information using digital images.