Forensic analysis of video steganography tools

Steganography is the art and science of concealing information in such a way that only the sender and intended recipient of a message should be aware of its presence. Digital steganography has been used in the past on a variety of media including executable files, audio, text, games and, notably, images. There is increasing research interest towards the use of video as a media for steganography. This is, at least in part, due to its pervasive nature and good embedding capabilities. In this article, we examine the embedding algorithms and security characteristics of several video steganography tools. We conclude that many feature basic and severe weaknesses. This constitutes a serious threat to those using these applications, some of which have perfectly legal or ethical reasons to do so, such as those whose freedom of speech is superseded by oppressive regimes, whistle-blowers, journalists, etc. As a result of our findings, we strongly recommend to cease any use of these tools, and to remove any contents that may have been hidden, exchanged and/or uploaded online. For many of these tools, carrier files will be trivial to detect, potentially compromising any hidden data. We finish this work by presenting our steganalytic results, that highlight a very poor state of the art in practical video steganography tools. As there is a complete lack of secure and publicly available tools, both free and commercial, we therefore encourage the steganography community to work towards the development of more secure and accessible video steganography tools for the general public. The results presented in this work can also be seen as a useful resource for forensic examiners to determine the existence of any video steganography materials over the course of a computer forensic investigation.