Compatibility and Timing Attacks for JPEG Steganalysis

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel compatibility attack to detect a steganographic message embedded in the DCT domain of a JPEG image at high-quality factors (close to 100). Because the JPEG compression is not a surjective function, i.e. not every DCT blocks can be mapped from a pixel block, embedding a message in the DCT domain can create incompatible blocks. We propose a method to find such a block, which directly proves that a block has been modified during the embedding. This theoretical method provides many advantages such as being completely independent to Cover Source Mismatch, having good detection power, and perfect reliability since false alarms are impossible as soon as incompatible blocks are found. We show that finding an incompatible block is equivalent to proving the infeasibility of an Integer Linear Programming problem. However, solving such a problem requires considerable computational power and has not been reached for 8x8 blocks. Instead, a timing attack approach is presented to perform steganalysis without potentially any false alarms for large computing power.