Chaotic iterations versus Spread-spectrum: topological-security and stego-security

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between topological-security and stego-security in information hiding, introducing a new scheme that outperforms spread-spectrum techniques in topological-security metrics.

Contribution

It presents a novel data hiding scheme that is both stego and topological-secure, enhancing the framework for comparing security properties of data hiding methods.

Findings

The new scheme is twice secure in both stego and topological senses.

Spread-spectrum techniques are also topologically-secure.

The new framework improves comparison of data hiding security schemes.

Abstract

A new framework for information hiding security, called topological-security, has been proposed in a previous study. It is based on the evaluation of unpredictability of the scheme, whereas existing notions of security, as stego-security, are more linked to information leaks. It has been proven that spread-spectrum techniques, a well-known stego-secure scheme, are topologically-secure too. In this paper, the links between the two notions of security is deepened and the usability of topological-security is clarified, by presenting a novel data hiding scheme that is twice stego and topological-secure. This last scheme has better scores than spread-spectrum when evaluating qualitative and quantitative topological-security properties. Incidentally, this result shows that the new framework for security tends to improve the ability to compare data hiding scheme.