Steganography and Digital Watermarking

Corresponding entry in Aachen Campus, Bonn University (Lecture, Tutorial).

Responsible

Prof. Dr. Joachim von zur Gathen

Lecture

Laila El Aimani

Time & Place

24 February - 03 March 9⁰⁰-18⁰⁰, Hörsaal, b-it (computer lab in the U37/38 pools)

Start: Tuesday 24 February at 9.00 in the Hörsaal, b-it.

Prerequisites

None

Steganography deals with hiding information into covert channels in order to conceal messages. It is in this way a supplement (not a replacement) to encryption since it aims at preventing information from being seen and not from being understood.
While steganography focusses on the message to be hidden, watermarking has its focus on the covert channel. In fact, watermarking is a branch of information hiding that originated from the need for copyright protection of digital media; it intends to hide information about the medium, the watermark, into the medium in order to prove its ownership.
The course gives an overview of the most popular information hiding techniques/systems in the research community or industry. It presents furthermore attacks on these systems as well as methods to countermeasure these attacks.

Course Material

Entropy, relative Entropy and Mutual Information, by Thomas M.Cover, Joy A. Thomas.
An Information-Theoretic Model for Steganography, by Christian Cachin .
Secure Hash-and-Sign Signatures Without the Random Oracle, by Rosario Gennaro, Shai Halevi and Tal Rabin.
Provably Secure Steganography by Nicholas J. Hopper, John Langford and Luis von Ahn.
Efficient Steganography with Provable Security Guarantees, by Aggelos Kiayias, Yona Raekow and Alexander Russell.
Attacks on Steganographic Systems, by Andreas Westfeld and Andreas Pfitzmann.

Tutorial

Exam

Thursday 12 March 2009, b-it Hörsaal, at 14.30.

Permitted auxiliary means are:

writing materials,
a pocket calculator (non-programmable, without division with remainder, without linear algebra software),

a cheat sheet, DIN A4, two-sided, written only with your own handwriting.

Any other utilities, even own paper, are not permitted.

Literature

Books
1. Information Hiding: Techniques for steganography and digital watermarking, Katzenbeisser and Petitcolas, Artech House, 2000. ISBN 1-58053-035-4.
2. Information Hiding - Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures, Johnson, Duric, and Jajodia, Kluwer, 2001.
3. Multimedia Security: Steganography and Digital Watermarking Techniques for Protection of Intellectual Property, Chun-Shien Lu, IDEA Group Publishing.
4. Disappearing Cryptography - Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking, Wayner, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
Conference Proceedings: Springer-Verlag LNCS on Information Hiding Workshops.

Allocation

Equivalent 2+2 SWS.

Media Informatics: Computer and Communication Technology.

Recommendation for University of Bonn - Computer Science: A or A1, respectively.

Language

The course will be held in English.