PART V

CONCLUSION

�    Limitations of Steganography and our Project

As of this writing, a counterfeiting scheme has been demonstrated for a class of invertible, feature-based, frequency domain, invisiblen steganography algorithms. This counterfeiting scheme could be used to subvert ownership claims because the recovery of the digital signature from a steganographed image requires a comparison with an original. The counterfeiting scheme works by first creating a counterfeit steganographed copy from the genuine steganographed copy by effectively inverting the genuine one. This inversion creates a counterfeit of the original image which satisfies two properties:

(a)     A comparison of the decoded versions of both the original and counterfeit original yields the owner's (authorized) signature.

(b)   A comparison of decoded versions of both the original and counterfeit original yield the forged (inverted) signature.

 This, the technique of establishing legitimate ownership recovering the signature steganographed image by comparing a steganographed image with the original image breaks down. It can be shown that both the legitimate signature and counterfeiter's signature inhere in both the original and counterfeit steganographed copies. Thus, while it may be demonstrated that at least one recipient has a counterfeit steganographed copy, it can not be determined which it is.

To be effective in the protection of the ownership of intellectual property, the invisibly steganographed  document should satisfy several criteria:

1. The steganography must be difficult or impossible to remove, at least without visibly degrading the original image,
2. The stegged image must survive image modifications that are common to typical image-processing applications (e.g., scaling, color requantization, dithering, cropping, and image compression),

One can understand the challenge of researchers in this field since the above requirements compete, each with the others. The litmus test of a watermarking method would be that it is accepted and used on a large, commercial scale, and that it stands up in a court of law. None of the digital techniques have yet to meet these tests.

 Our project also suffers from some drawbacks and limitations as all development software do. There are ample rooms for improvements and for making the software much more customized.

As regards to our implementation of Steganography on text files, there is a constriction on the number of characters that make up the hidden message. Though four characters could have been inserted per line but we have dealt with only two due to the problems in justification, which we have avoided.

As regards to our implementation of Steganography on image files, there’s a lot many fields to be improved. Firstly, we have not used any authentication means in our implementation. Secondly, no key have been generated. Actually this portion is still under development and though the detection of hidden message within the image is not possible but the modification by an opponent during transmission cannot be detected. 

 Thus we have endeavored to build an application package where hidden messages can be embedded within a text as well as within image files and can be sent over the network.

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