A false negative study of the steganalysis tool: Stegdetect

Steganography and Steganalysis in recent years have become an important area of research involving dierent applications. Steganography is the process of hiding secret data into any digital media without any signicant notable changes in a cover object, while steganalysis is the process of detecting hiding content in the cover object. In this study, we evaluated one of the modern automated steganalysis tools, Stegdetect, to study its false negative rates when analysing a bulk of images. In so doing, we used JPHide method to embed a randomly generated messages into 2000 JPEG images. The aim of this study is to help digital forensics analysts during their investigations by means of providing an idea of the false negative rates of Stegdetect. This study found that (1) the false negative rates depended largely on the tool's sensitivity values, (2) the tool had a high false negative rate between the sensitivity values from 0.1 to 3.4 and (3) the best sensitivity value for detection of JPHide method was 6.2. It is recommended that when analysing a huge bulk of images forensic analysts need to take into consideration sensitivity values to reduce the false negative rates of Stegdetect.