A Practical Steganographic Approach for Matroska Based High Quality Video Files

Abstract

Several steganographic algorithms have been proposed for protecting message secrecy against unauthorized "reads". The most used method for hiding a message relies on embedding the secret message in Least Significant Bit (LSB) on the cover object. Though various digital formats have been proposed in literature to be used as cover objects, little attention has been paid on Matroska multimedia containers. In this work, we propose a practical method for applying steganography in these types of files. The proposed method consists of three distinct phases. The first one encrypts the hidden message, the second embeds it to the stego cover, while at the final step the stego cover is attached to a Matroska container. We tested our approach in various scenarios in order to evaluate the introduced overhead. Results shows that the use of several sizes for TXT and WAV files did not introduce considerable overhead. Depending on the file size the introduce overhead can be between 1 to 3 seconds.