The Problem of Choosing a Steganographic Container in Conditions of Attacks against an Embedded Message

Abstract

Steganography is the perspective area of information security. The reliability of the stegano- graphic system, its stability is affected by the carrier – a container, which is considered in the paper as a digital image. The aim of the work is to increase the resistance of a steganographic system to attacks against an embedded message by developing a method for choosing a contain-er from a finite set of available digital images that ensures the transmitted message the minimum (close to the minimum) possible sensitivity of the generated steganographic message to disturb-ing influences under consideration with the selected steganographic algorithm. The goal was achieved using a theoretical study of perturbations of the formal parameters of the container ma-trix, as a result of steganographic transformation and active attacks, which made it possible to introduce a new formal representation for information protected from perturbing influence E, as the difference of low-rank approximations of container matrices and steganographic messages. The most important result of the work is the development of a container selection method ready for practical implementation. The efficiency of the developed method exceeds the efficiency of analogs, it remains high, regardless of the used steganographic method, which allows increasing the overall resistance of the steganographic system to attacks against the embedded message. The significance of the obtained result lies in the use of the developed method of increasing the stability of the steganographic system to attacks against the embedded message.