The information hiding homepage

Foreword by Ross Anderson

Hardcover, approx. 220 pages.
Artech House Books, December 1999
ISBN 1-58053-035-4
(Available on Amazon.com)

Until recently, information hiding techniques received very much less attention from the research community and from industry than cryptography. This situation is, however, changing rapidly and the first academic conference on this topic was organized in 1996. The main driving force is concern over protecting copyright; as audio, video and other works become available in digital form, the ease with which perfect copies can be made may lead to large-scale unauthorized copying, and this is of great concern to the music, film, book and software publishing industries. At the same time, moves by various governments to restrict the availability of encryption services have motivated people to study methods by which private messages can be embedded in seemingly innocuous cover messages.

This book surveys recent research results in the fields of watermarking and steganography, two disciplines generally referred to as information hiding. Included are chapters about the following topics:

• Chapter 1: Introduction to information hiding (Fabien A. P. Petitcolas) gives an introduction to the field of information hiding, thereby discussing the history of steganography and watermarking and possible applications to modern communication systems.
• Chapter 2: Principles of steganography (Stefan Katzenbeisser) introduces a model for steganographic communication (the ‘prisoners problem") and discusses various steganographic protocols (such as pure steganography, secret key steganography, public key steganography and supraliminal channels).
• Chapter 3: A survey of steganographic techniques (Neil F. Johnson and Stefan Katzenbeisser) discusses several information hiding methods useable for steganographic communication, among them substitution systems, hiding methods in two-colour images, transform domain techniques, statistical steganography, distortion and cover generation techniques.
• Chapter 4: Steganalysis (Neil F. Johnson) introduces the concepts of steganalysis – the task of detecting and possibly removing steganographic information. Included is also an analysis of common steganographic tools.
• Chapter 5: Introduction to watermarking techniques (Martin Kutter and Frank Hartung) introduces the requirements and design issues for watermarking software. The authors also present possible applications for watermarks and discuss methods for evaluating watermarking systems.
• Chapter 6: A survey of current watermarking techniques (Jean-Luc Dugelay and Stéphane Roche) presents several design principles for watermarking systems, among them the choice of host locations, psychovisual aspects, the choice of a workspace (DFT, DCT, wavelet), the format of the watermark bits (spread spectrum, low-frequency watermark design), the watermark insertion operator and optimizations of the watermark receiver.
• Chapter 7: Robustness of copyright marking systems (Scott Craver, Adrian Perrig and Fabien A. P. Petitcolas) discusses the crucial issue of watermark robustness to intentional attacks. The chapter includes a taxonomy of possible attacks against watermarking systems, among them protocol attacks like inversion, oracle attacks, limitations of WWW spiders and system architecture issues.
• Chapter 8: Fingerprinting (Jong-Hyeon Lee) discusses principles and applications of fingerprinting to the traitor tracing problem, among them statistical fingerprinting, asymmetric fingerprinting and anonymous fingerprinting.
• Chapter 9: Copyright on the Internet and watermarking (Stanley Lai and Fabrizio Marongiu Buonaiuti) finally discusses watermarking systems from a legal point of view and addresses various other aspects of copyright law on the Internet.