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OutGuess 0.2
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2001-02-12 - Niels Provos <[email protected]>

OutGuess is a universal steganographic tool that allows the insertion
of hidden information into the redundant bits of data sources.  The
nature of the data source is irrelevant to the core of OutGuess.  The
program relies on data specific handlers that will extract redundant
bits and write them back after modification.  In this version the PNM
and JPEG image formats are supported.  In the next paragraphs, images
will be used as concrete example of data objects, though OutGuess can
use any kind of data, as long as a handler is provided.

OutGuess is available under the BSD software license.  It is
completely free for any use including commercial.  

Please see each source file for its respective license.  OutGuess was
developed in Germany.

Steganography is the art and sience of hiding that communication is
happening.  Classical steganography systems depend on keeping the
encoding system secret, but modern steganography are detectable only
if secret information is known, e.g. a secret key.  Because of their
invasive nature steganography systems leave detectable traces within a
medium's characteristics.  This allows an eavesdropper to detect media
that has been modified, revealing that secret communication is taking
place.  Although the secrecy of the information is not degraded, its
hidden nature is revealed, defeating the main purpose of
Steganography.

For JPEG images, OutGuess preserves statistics based on frequency
counts.  As a result, no known statistical test is able to detect
the presence of steganographic content.  Before embedding data
into an image, the OutGuess system can determine the maximum
message size that can be hidden while still being able to maintain
statistics based on frequency counts.

OutGuess uses a generic iterator object to select which bits in the
data should be modified.  A seed can be used to modify the behavior
of the iterator. It is embedded in the data along with the rest of the
message.  By altering the seed, OutGuess tries to find a sequence of
bits that minimizes the number of changes in the data that have to be
made.

A sample output from OutGuess is as follows:

Reading dscf0001.jpg....
JPEG compression quality set to 75
Extracting usable bits: 40059 bits
Correctable message size: 21194 bits, 52.91%
Encoded 'snark.bz2': 14712 bits, 1839 bytes
Finding best embedding...
    0:  7467(50.6%)[50.8%], bias  8137(1.09), saved:   -13, total: 18.64%
    1:  7311(49.6%)[49.7%], bias  8079(1.11), saved:     5, total: 18.25%
    4:  7250(49.2%)[49.3%], bias  7906(1.09), saved:    13, total: 18.10%
   59:  7225(49.0%)[49.1%], bias  7889(1.09), saved:    16, total: 18.04%
59, 7225: Embedding data: 14712 in 40059
Bits embedded: 14744, changed: 7225(49.0%)[49.1%], bias: 7889, tot: 40032, skip: 25288
Foiling statistics: corrections: 2590, failed: 1, offset: 122.585494 +- 239.664983
Total bits changed: 15114 (change 7225 + bias 7889)
Storing bitmap into data...
Writing foil/dscf0001.jpg....

The simple example script "seek_script" uses OutGuess to select an image
that fits the data we want to hide the best, yielding the lowest number
of changed bits.  Because we do not care about the actual content of
the cover data we send, this is a very viable approach.

Additionally, OutGuess allows to hide multiple messages in the data.
Thus, it also provides plausible deniablity.  It keeps track of the
bits that have been modified previously and locks them.  A (23,12,7)
Golay code is used for error correction to tolerate collisions on
locked bits.  Artifical errors are introduced to avoid modifying bits
that have a hight bias.

This version of OutGuess can insert only two different messages.
As this is a BETA version, I would like you to give me feedback on
the usefulness of OutGuess.  And if you like it, you can support
me via the links on

  http://www.outguess.org/

Installation
------------
OutGuess has been modified to use autoconf, a normal installation
should require only

1. ./configure && make

There is an optimization bug in gcc, you might have to compile
with -O0.

If your system is not supported, trying building by hand as follows

1. Install the JPEG-6b libjpeg.a library and patch it with
   jpeg-6b-steg.diff.  You can obtain the source from
   ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz.
   The Makefile expects the library to be at ../jpeg-6b.

2. Edit the Makefile and type make

OutGuess has only been tested on OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris and AIX.

BUGS:
-----
None known at the moment.

Acknowledgments:
----------------
OutGuess uses code from, attributions can also be found in the sources,

 Markus Kuhn's Stirmark software, see STIRMARK-README.
 
 the Independent JPEG Group's JPEG software, see JPEG_README.
 
 the Arc4 random number generator for OpenBSD, (c) 1996 by
 David Mazieres <[email protected]>.

 free MD5 code by Colin Plumb.

For determining the redundant bits out of a JPEG image, the jpeg-jsteg-v4
patches by Derek Upham <[email protected]> were helpful.

Thanks to
  Dug Song <[email protected]> for helping with configure,
  Andrew Reiter <[email protected]> for testing on Solaris.