The use of steganography, the art of concealed communications, can be traced back to the Antiquity and is receiving today a renewed interest. There have been several anecdotal reports that terrorists and organized crime are using steganographic techniques to transmit information in a covert manner. Steganography can also be used as a forensic technique. For example, it has been reported that Margaret Thatcher used steganography to identify the source of cabinet leaks of confidential information. Finally, steganography has also been reported as a possible tool for hackers to conceal the malicious activity of spywares. In other words, although steganography offers the potential to provide enhanced freedom of speech in oppressive regimes, it is mostly used today for criminal activities e.g. terrorism, organized crime, cyber crime, etc. This situation has motivated significant research funded by homeland security agencies to develop automatic tools, referred to as steganalyzers, which are able to detect such covert communications. During this talk, we will focus on a simple technique for image steganography and survey the corresponding steganalyzers proposed in the literature to highlight their strengths and limitations.

Giacomo Cancelli

Giacomo Cancelli received the Informatics Engineer degree from the University of Siena, Siena, Italy, in 2005. Since 2005 he has been with the Department of Information Engineering, University of Siena, Italy, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the area of data hiding. About watermarking, he has collaborated from June 2006 to May 2007 with an Italian company called Centrica on a new Fourier domain watermarking technique based on orthogonal dirty paper coding. About steganography, he is developing a new steganographic algorithm for grayscale- and color-images called MPSteg by using high redundant basis domain ad Matching Pursuit decomposition. About steganalysis, he is working ia new target-based steganalyzer technique called ALE, which outperform the current state-of-art of the analysis in the detection of LSB-matching applied on still images. From June 2007 he is affiliated to UCL thanks to the European exchanging program called Erasmus. The research in steganalysis field is done inside this program, under the supervision of Prof. Ingemar J. Cox and with the collaboration of Dr. Gwenaël Doërr.

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