News Briefs

Criminals, spies, and terrorists are always looking for better ways to communicate with one another without detection by police and intelligence officers. The officials fear their foes might turn to steganography, a technique that hides a small message within the code representing an image or other standard computer file. With this in mind, Iowa State University scientists developed an innovative application, called artificial neural network technology for steganalysis (ANNTS), to find such hidden data. The most common steganographic method makes small changes to a JPEG or other image via bits of information that represent the hidden message, which could be plain or encrypted text or another image. ANNTS uses artificial neural networks to statistically scan digital files and then examine them for changes in pixel values to detect the likely presence of steganographically hidden data, ANNTS works with multiple types of neural networks designed to find files hidden by different, even sophisticated, steganographic techniques. The researchers trained their neural networks to identify hidden data by having them analyze large numbers of steganographically altered files. The technology can accurately identify steganographic images between 85 and 100 percent of the time