Distributed data hiding in multi-cloud storage environment

Abstract

Classical or traditional steganography aims at hiding a secret in cover media such as text, image, audio, video or even in network protocols. Recent research has improved this approach called distributed steganography by fragmenting the secret message and embedding each secret piece into a distinct cover media. The major interest of this approach is to make the secret message detection extremely difficult. However, these file modifications leave fingerprints which can reveal a secret channel to an attacker. Our contribution is a new steganography paradigm transparent to any attacker and resistant to the detection and the secret extraction. Two properties contribute to achieve these goals: the files do not undergo any modification while the distribution of the secret in the multi-cloud storage environment allows us to hide the existence of the covert channel between the communicating parties. Information’s are usually hidden inside the cover media. In this work, the covert media is a pointer to information. Therefore the file carries the information without being modified and the only way to access it is to have the key. Experiments show interesting comparison results with remarkable security contributions. The work can be seen as a new open direction for further research in the field.

Distributed Data Hiding in A Single Cloud Storage Environment

“…Our approach presented above, is a technique of hiding information in a cloud computing storage environment that solves the problems of cloud management and key management in Moyou and Ndoundam's method [19], by proceeding as follows:…”

“…This modification presents a fault in view of the different steganographic attacks so they are subjected. So, in order to get around this problem, Moyou and Ndoundam [19] have proposed an approach where the cover medium carries the information without being modified, the medium is considered as an index to secret information.…”

“…The management of clouds of the concealment scheme proposed by Moyou and Ndoundam [19] which can turns to be tedious to manage, for a large number of clouds. And the key sharing between the participating entities containing sensitive files to conceal the secret.…”

“…In this section we present an evaluation of the hidden bits capacity of our proposed scheme and the execution through 3 examples. Then we present a discussion with the works of Moyou and Ndoundam [19] and finally a security analysis of our proposed scheme.…”

“…Thus the different attacks in steganography, in general are based on the changing properties of the cover media when a communication is revealed [18]. In order to solve this problem, Moyou and Ndoundam [19] have proposed a distributed method data hiding in multi-cloud storage environment by considering several types of media as an index of a part of the secret. This method considers beforehand an exchange of files between the participating entities during a communication or meeting, which is susceptible to suspicion.…”