RESEARCH PROPOSAL - PRESENTATION AND FORMAT GUIDELINES

TEMPLATE FOR BSc THESIS

University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan

Congratulations on fulfilling your requirements for the application of your research proposal,
this phase should be completed in a timely manner to ensure that you can get on with your
research and thesis writing.

The research proposal is your opportunity to plan your research and present this plan to your
department’s Project Research Evaluation Committee (PREC) to convince the PREC and the
university that the research has merit and should be supported.

In order to have clear understanding of your research proposal it is essential that the proposal
be written in plain language, brief, defining technical terms and not assuming any prior
knowledge of the research committee.

The proposal will proceed to the faculty postgraduate research committee for consideration
and approval. Sometimes revisions will be requested before the proposal can be finally
approved. Do not be discouraged by this. Critical peer review is a normal part of the academic
process and does not imply that you do not have the ability or your research will not be
successful. It is simply a way of ensuring that the foundations for your research are as sound
and strong as possible. Comments received from the committee needs to be reflected in
amendments or redrafting as agreed with them.

We aim to ensure that you complete your thesis with the minimum of amendments and the
most positive assessment by examiners. Approval of your research proposal is the first step
on the journey to achieving an excellent outcome from your research leading towards the
award of degree in the relevant field.
Print the project title and your Name here as a header on every page of the document

UNIVERSITY OF ENGINEERING DNA TECHNOLOGY,

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN
GRADUATE RESEARCH PROPOSAL

PREC Member PREC Member PREC member

 Print the project title and your Name here as a header on every page of the document

1. INTRODUCTION
Steganography is the science of hiding information in some other form of information and
then transmitting that hidden information such that it is hard to discover and recovered if
detected. The word steganography is actually the combination of two Greek words,
“Stegos” meaning hidden / covered/ or roof, and “Graphia” meaning writing [1]
Cryptography also deals with information hiding. It composed of two Greek words
“kryptós” meaning hidden/secret and “Graphia” meaning writing.
The concept of both steganography and cryptography is same but still there is a difference
between them. The main idea of cryptography is to hide the information and steganography
is related to keep the existence of information hidden. [2] So the main purpose of
steganography is to hide information in a way that the information even can’t be detected.
This un-detectability is the major difference between cryptography and steganography as in
cryptography one can easily notice the existence of secret information. [3]
Steganography is mostly applied on images, videos, audios and text. [3] The files with high
redundancy are most suitable for steganography. Redundancy provides high accuracy rather
than the necessary data. So the redundant bit can be changed without effecting hidden
information. [4] Image steganography can be applied in different ways, i.e. steganography
in spatial domain and steganography in frequency domain. In spatial domain data replaced
with the least significant bit in cover media. 1st to 4th bits can be replaced with the secret
data. In frequency domain data is hidden in coefficients after applying DCT on an image.

1.1 The research problem

One of the prime feature of steganography is security beside the amount of hidden data. Un-
detectability of hidden information or non-retrieval of hidden information must be the first
priority as the stego image will have to pass through a certain communication channel. In
this research work a technique will be devised to enhance the security of stego image to
make it impossible to retrieve the hidden information by the intruders while keeping the
message size unaffected.

1.2 The purpose of the study

Purpose of this study is to enhance security of stego image in such a way that it could be
transmitted with a least probability of retrieval by unauthorized person during transmission
over any medium. This research work will contribute in securing information during
exchange over unreliable communication channels.

PREC Member PREC Member PREC member

 Print the project title and your Name here as a header on every page of the document

1.3 The objectives of the study

Objective of this research work is to use already developed 4-Least Significant Bit (4LSB)
steganography technique to develop a new technique of “stego block chaining” to enhance
security of stego images for safe transmission over ordinary communication channels. This
work will make it hard for an intruder to extract information even if the stego image is
eavesdropped.
In this project the effect of repeating steganography process will be on hiding capacity as
will which will be analysed thoroughly.

1.4 The research questions

Image steganography has already been used.
How motivated to this technique.
Effect on size of hidden message.

SECTION 2: CONTRIBUTION TO KNOWLEDGE & STATEMENT OF

SIGNIFICANCE
2.1 Contribution to Knowledge (Academic Contribution)
This research work will contribute in the field of enhanced secure image steganography,
whose main aim is to transmit secure data over ordinary medium efficiently. The proposed
work will devise technique to tackle the issue of hidden data by unauthorized person.
Security enhancement will be done by stego block chaining (SBC) method, which is to be
devised in this project.

2.2 Statement of Significance (Practical Contribution)

For secure communication between different nodes by armed forces located in remote
area, this technique can be of greater importance, because in remote areas it is most
probable that a transmission media will have limited security and the information
transmission and retrieval is not compromised.

SECTION 3: LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Maximum five pages

Steganography is the process of sending secret data by embedding it in some cover media
like an image, audio, video or text. Different types of security systems exists as shown in
Figure.01. [7] Steganography is different from cryptography as in cryptography the data is
PREC Member PREC Member PREC member
 Print the project title and your Name here as a header on every page of the document

encoded in some other form, so if found can be easily suspected as secret data whether
could be decoded or not, on the other hand steganography hides data in some other form of
data even if found can’t be suspected of having embedded secret data. The main purpose
of steganography is un-detectability of hidden data. [3]
The word steganography is actually the combination of two Greek words, “Stegos”
meaning hidden / covered/ or roof, and “Graphia” meaning writing. [1]
Steganography has root in an ancient time where different methods were used for
conveying secret messages between different people. Roman Generals shaved the heads of
slaves and hidden messages were tattoo on them. After growing hair back the slaves were
dispatched to their destinations and message were retrieved by shaving their heads back.
[6]
Now in this digital era steganography has gone digital. Different types of cover media are
used for hiding information in them.

Figure 1: Security Systems

Steganography can be applied to those cover media where redundancy is high. As in the
images redundancy is high so image steganography is most popular in them. [8] Image
steganography can be applied in different ways. Different image format can be used for
steganography purpose. Graphic interchange format (GIF) and joint photographic expert
group (JPEG) are popular among them. Different techniques are used to exploit the format
of the image for data hiding. The following method is used to insert data in cover media:

PREC Member PREC Member PREC member

 Print the project title and your Name here as a header on every page of the document

Em :C ⊕ K ⊕ M → C '
Ex ( Em ( c , k , m ) ) ≈ m , ∀ c ∈C , k ∈ K , m∈ M
“Em” is for embedded message, “C” represent cover image, “K” represent and optional
key, “M” is the message signal and “C/” stego image. “Ex” represent extracted message.
[7] Steganography can be applied in spatial domain as well as in frequency domain. Secret
data is replaced in in cover media in spatial domain. This replacement is always done at
LSBs level. As compared to other methods, this method is simple and easy to implement.
[9] In Figure. 2 this method is highlighted:

Figure 2: Steganography in Spatial Domain

Due to the performance of the spatial domain technique and requirement of high security
system new algorithms keep emerging. The discovery of the LSB embedding mechanism
is actually a big achievement. Although it is perfect in not deceiving the HVS, its weak
resistance to attacks left researchers wondering where to apply it next until they
successfully applied it within the frequency domain. The description of the two-
dimensional DCT for an input image F and output image T is calculated as:

T M−1 N−1
π ( 2 m+1 ) p π ( 2 n+ 1) q
pq=¿α p α q ∑ ∑ Fmn cos cos ¿
m=0 n=0 2M 2N

Where
0 ≤ p ≤ M −1
0 ≤ q ≤ N −1

PREC Member PREC Member PREC member

 Print the project title and your Name here as a header on every page of the document

And

{
1
, P=0
α p= √M
√2 ,1 ≤ p ≤ M −1
M

{
1
, q=0
α q= √N
√2 ,1 ≤ q ≤ N −1
N

where M, N are the dimensions of the input image while m, n are variables ranging from 0
to M-1 and 0 to N-1 respectively. [7]
After applying steganography next phase is transmission of the stego image. Transmitting
large image over standard internet connection becomes hard, so image compression is used
to reduce its size for sending on standard internet connection. [5] Image can be compressed
in two ways, i.e. lossless and lossy compression. Lossy compression reduce image file to a
smaller size with the higher possibility of loss of some portion of message signal while in
lossless compression message signal is recovered fully but image in not compressed to
smaller size. [4]

SECTION 4: APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY

Inspired from “Cipher Block Chaining” a new technique will be developed as “Stego
Block Chaining” for enhancing security. In Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) data is divided
in blocks and encryption is applied on each individual block having different encryption
key for each block. The main purpose of CBC is security and confidentiality of the
message signal.
Stego Block Chaining (SBC) will implemented in slight different way from CBC. Clock
diagram of SBC is given below:

PREC Member PREC Member PREC member

 Print the project title and your Name here as a header on every page of the document

Figure 3: Stego Block Chaining

This technique is proposed to have N number of stages where N>2 depending on the
required data hiding capacity. Tentative block diagram of the proposed method is given in
Figure 03.
In the proposed technique will be hide in the 4-Least significant Bits (4LSB) of cover
image. Each stage is having 50% data hiding capacity so in each stage the cover should be
double in size as that of the corresponding secret message. In 1 st stage secret message will
be hide using 4LSB steganographic technique and the resultant stego image of the 1 st
stage will act as secret message for 2nd stage. This process will continue up to N number
of stage and the in each stage the message will be the stego image of previous stage
except 1st which will be original message to hide.

 Data Collection:

No need for data collection for this research.

PREC Member PREC Member PREC member

 Print the project title and your Name here as a header on every page of the document

SECTION 5: BUDGET AND FEASIBILITY

Print date here
a. Proposed starting date
Print date here
b. Expected date of completion

c. Are facilities available for the Yes

work?

d. Additional facilities required N/A

give details.

(Print details here)

Itemized Expenses: (details of expenditure).

Item Cost

Total Rs:0.00

Budget for this research is almost zero as only Matlab simulation will be used here.

SECTION 6: SCEDULE
Include a plan of expected progress in Gantt chart form. A sample is provided below:

Activity 2015 2016

September October November December January February March April

Literature
Review
PREC Member PREC Member PREC member
 Print the project title and your Name here as a header on every page of the document

Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
Thesis
Write up
Submission

SECTION 7: REFERENCE LIST

[1] Krenn, Robert. "Steganography: Implementation & Detection." found online at<
http://www. krenn. nl/univ/cry/steg/presentation/2004-01-21-presentation-steganography.
pdf (2004).
[2] Bose, Ranjan. Information theory, coding and cryptography. Tata McGraw-Hill
Education, 2008.
[3] Channalli, Shashikala, and Ajay Jadhav. "Steganography an art of hiding data."arXiv
preprint arXiv:0912.2319 (2009).
[4] Kumari, Meenu, A. Khare, and Pallavi Khare. "JPEG compression steganography &
crypography using image-adaptation technique." journal of advances in information
technology 1.3 (2010): 141-145.
[5] Smith, Steven W. "The scientist and engineer's guide to digital signal processing."
(1997).
[6] Dickman, Shawn. "An Overview of Steganography." Department of Computer
Science, James Madison University Infosec Techreport (2007).
[7] Cheddad, Abbas, et al. "Digital image steganography: Survey and analysis of current
methods." Signal processing 90.3 (2010): 727-752.
[8] Khare, Pallavi, Jaikaran Singh, and Mukesh Tiwari. "Digital Image
Steganography." Journal of Engineering Research and Studies 2: 101-104.
[9] P. Alvarez, Using extended file information (EXIF) file headers in digital evidence
analysis, International Journal of Digital Evidence, Economic Crime Institute (ECI) 2 (3)
(2004) 1–5.

PREC Member PREC Member PREC member