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Enhancing the anti-steganalysis ability of steganography via adversarial examples

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Abstract

Steganography technology can effectively conceal secret information in the carrier medium, enable covert communication without drawing the attention of a third party, and ensure the safe and reliable transmission of confidential information. However, with the development of steganalysis technology, steganalysers based on deep learning can accurately identify the modification traces in the steganographic cover, which poses a huge threat to steganography. Therefore, the focus of the research is how to reduce the detection accuracy of deep learning-based steganalyzer. In this work, we design an Adversarial Example STeganography (AEST) method, which hides the secret grayscale image into the color cover image to obtain the stego image that is difficult to distinguish by the naked eye. Then, the attack module composed of the FGM and PGD adversarial attacks added small perturbations to generate adversarial steganographic images, reducing the detection accuracy of the steganalyzer. In addition, to reduce the impact of adversarial examples on secret information recovery, we designed a decoder based on adversarial training and the generative adversarial network. Finally, the experimental results show that AEST has a good performance of anti-steganalysis ability. For example, the adversarial steganographic image based on PGD attack can make the detection error rate of the XuNet steganalyzer reach 63.511%.

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code Availability

The code during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information and Communication, National University of Defense Technology, 45 Liberation Park Road, WuHan, 430000, Hubei, China

    Ye Peng, GuoBin Fu, Qi Yu, YingGuang Luo, Jia Hu & ChaoFan Duan

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  1. Ye Peng
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  2. GuoBin Fu
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  3. Qi Yu
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  4. YingGuang Luo
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  5. Jia Hu
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  6. ChaoFan Duan
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Ye Peng, GuoBin Fu, Qi Yu, YingGunag Luo, Jia Hu and ChaoFan Duan. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Ye Peng and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to YingGuang Luo.

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Peng, Y., Fu, G., Yu, Q. et al. Enhancing the anti-steganalysis ability of steganography via adversarial examples. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 6227–6247 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-15306-z

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