Steganalysis of Semi-fragile Watermarking Systems Resistant to
JPEG Compression
Anna Egorova
1
and Victor Fedoseev
1,2
1
Samara National Research University, Samara, Russia
2
Image Processing Systems Institute, Branch of the Federal Scientific Research Centre “Crystallography and Photonics” of
Russian Academy of Sciences, Samara, Russia
Keywords: Image Protection, JPEG, Semi-fragile Watermarking, Targeted Steganalysis, LSB, QIM.
Abstract: Recently, dozens of semi-fragile digital watermarking systems have been designed to protect JPEG images
from unauthorized changes. Their principle is to embed an invisible protective watermark into the image.
Such a watermark is destroyed by any image editing operations, except for JPEG compression with the quality
level in a given range of values. Watermarking systems of this type have been assessed in terms of watermark
extraction accuracy and visual quality of the protected image. However, their steganographic security (i.e.,
robustness against detecting protective information traces by a third party) has not been sufficiently studied.
Meanwhile, if an attacker detects the presence of a watermark in the image, he can get valuable information
on the used image protection technique. It can let him develop a data modification method that alters the
content of the protected image without destroying the embedded watermark. In this paper, we propose a
specific attack to analyze steganographic security of known semi-fragile watermarking algorithms for JPEG
images. We also investigate the efficiency of the proposed attack. In addition, we propose an approach to
counter the attack that can be applied in the existing watermarking systems to enforce their steganographic
security.
1 INTRODUCTION
At present, the role of visual information (in
particular images) has increased in various areas of
the digital economy: e-commerce, medicine,
education, etc. Consequently, image authentication
and malicious change detection in images have
become the tasks of great importance. Note that
images are mostly compressed in practice. For this
reason, distortions caused by JPEG, JPEG 2000, and
other lossy compression formats are often considered
as legal modifications. For compressed images
authenticating, semi-fragile watermarking systems
can be used (Cox, 2008). In this paper, we consider
the watermarking systems that are robust only to
JPEG compression. They embed a watermark
(security information) into the image immediately
after image registration. Such the watermark has the
property to be preserved after JPEG compression, but
it is destroyed after any other modifications of the
image. The performance of such watermarking
systems has been proven (Egorova and Fedoseev,
2019), but their steganographic security (the ability to
detect watermark traces by a third party) has not
previously been examined. Meanwhile, if an intruder
detects the presence of such an embedded watermark
in the image, he can get information on the used
image protection system. Thereby, by using this
information, he can develop a data alteration method
that does not change the protective watermark but
distorts the image content.
In this study, we model a specific attack to analyze
steganographic security of various semi-fragile
watermarking systems designed for the JPEG
compression standard (Lin and Chang, 2000; Mursi et
al., 2009; Preda and Vizireanu, 2015; Fallahpour and
Megias, 2016; Egorova and Fedoseev, 2019). The
need for a new attack is caused by the fact that the
existing targeted attacks for JPEG steganography
methods (JSteg, F5, Model-based, etc.) (Fridrich,
2010) do not fit the semi-fragile embedding concept.
The essence of the proposed attack is that the
number and the distribution of both odd and nonzero
quantized DCT coefficients can be used as significant
features to detect a watermark, i.e., to separate
original images from watermarked ones.