Increasing the Efficiency of Blind Decoding of the Steganographic Method with Code Control of Additional Information Embedding

Abstract

Modern energy systems are often used as a medium for information transmission, including confidential information, which makes relevant the task of ensuring its security, which today is solved using not only cryptographic but also steganographic means that ensure concealment of the very fact of confidential information transmission. The steganographic method with code control of the additional information embedding possesses practical important qualities, but in its original form requires the presence of a container for successful information extraction, which is not always desirable in practice, while the known modification of this steganographic method allows blind decoding is characterized by an insufficient level of resistance to attacks against the embedded message. The purpose of this paper is to improve the efficiency of the steganographic method with code control of the additional information embedding and blind decoding. This purpose was achieved by identifying two factors that determine the occurrence of errors during blind decoding of additional information in the steganographic method with code control: variation of sub-blocks, and errors caused by attacks against the embedded message. We pro-pose the theoretical and practical rationale for codewords that provide the best level of re-sistance to both factors. The most significant result of the paper is a reduction in the number of decoding errors of the steganographic method with code control of the additional information embedding and blind decoding by 12.01% compared to the result known in the literature through a reasonable choice of codewords used to embed the additional information.

Keywords

• steganography
• code control
• walsh-hadamard transform
• compression attack
• jpeg
• robustness.