scholarly journals Forensic analysis of video steganography tools

Author(s):  
Thomas Sloan ◽  
Julio Hernandez-Castro

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. Additionally, there is increasing research interest towards the use of video as a media for steganography, due to its pervasive nature and diverse embedding capabilities. In this work, we examine the embedding algorithms and other security characteristics of several video steganography tools. We show how all feature basic and severe security weaknesses. This is potentially a very serious threat to the security, privacy and anonymity of their users. It is important to highlight that most steganography users have perfectly legal and ethical reasons to employ it. Some common scenarios would include citizens in oppressive regimes whose freedom of speech is compromised, people trying to avoid massive surveillance or censorship, political activists, 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, and any carriers stored, exchanged and/or uploaded online. For many of these tools, carrier files will be trivial to detect, potentially compromising any hidden data and the parties involved in the communication. We finish this work by presenting our steganalytic results, that highlight a very poor current state of the art in practical video steganography tools. There is unfortunately a complete lack of secure and publicly available tools, and even commercial tools offer very poor security. We therefore encourage the steganography community to work towards the development of more secure and accessible video steganography tools, and make them available 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.

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Sloan ◽  
Julio Hernandez-Castro

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. Additionally, there is increasing research interest towards the use of video as a media for steganography, due to its pervasive nature and diverse embedding capabilities. In this work, we examine the embedding algorithms and other security characteristics of several video steganography tools. We show how all feature basic and severe security weaknesses. This is potentially a very serious threat to the security, privacy and anonymity of their users. It is important to highlight that most steganography users have perfectly legal and ethical reasons to employ it. Some common scenarios would include citizens in oppressive regimes whose freedom of speech is compromised, people trying to avoid massive surveillance or censorship, political activists, 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, and any carriers stored, exchanged and/or uploaded online. For many of these tools, carrier files will be trivial to detect, potentially compromising any hidden data and the parties involved in the communication. We finish this work by presenting our steganalytic results, that highlight a very poor current state of the art in practical video steganography tools. There is unfortunately a complete lack of secure and publicly available tools, and even commercial tools offer very poor security. We therefore encourage the steganography community to work towards the development of more secure and accessible video steganography tools, and make them available 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.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Sloan ◽  
Julio Hernandez-Castro

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1688) ◽  
pp. 20150106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. McCarthy

Studies of sex differences in the brain range from reductionistic cell and molecular analyses in animal models to functional imaging in awake human subjects, with many other levels in between. Interpretations and conclusions about the importance of particular differences often vary with differing levels of analyses and can lead to discord and dissent. In the past two decades, the range of neurobiological, psychological and psychiatric endpoints found to differ between males and females has expanded beyond reproduction into every aspect of the healthy and diseased brain, and thereby demands our attention. A greater understanding of all aspects of neural functioning will only be achieved by incorporating sex as a biological variable. The goal of this review is to highlight the current state of the art of the discipline of sex differences research with an emphasis on the brain and to contextualize the articles appearing in the accompanying special issue.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai-Cheng Yan ◽  
Axel Steinbrueck ◽  
Adam C. Sedgwick ◽  
Tony D. James

Over the past 30 years fluorescent chemosensors have evolved to incorporate many optical-based modalities and strategies. In this perspective we seek to highlight the current state of the art as well as provide our viewpoint on the most significant future challenges remaining in the area. To underscore current trends in the field and to facilitate understanding of the area, we provide the reader with appropriate contemporary examples. We then conclude with our thoughts on the most probable directions that chemosensor development will take in the not-too-distant future.


2019 ◽  
Vol 217 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony S. David

Academic interest in the concept of insight in psychosis has increased markedly over the past 30 years, prompting this selective appraisal of the current state of the art. Considerable progress has been made in terms of measurement and confirming a number of clinical associations. More recently, the relationship between insight and involuntary treatment has been scrutinised more closely alongside the link between decision-making capacity and insight. Advances in the clinical and cognitive neurosciences have influenced conceptual development, particularly the field of ‘metacognition’. New therapies, including those that are psychologically and neurophysiologically based, are being tested as ways to enhance insight.


Geophysics ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles C. Bates

A decade ago, it would have been the rare geophysicist indeed who would have predicted that his specialty was destined to become a major topic of discussion between such world political leaders as Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, Prime Minister Macmillan of Great Britain, and Chairman Khrushchev of the USSR. Yet this has come to pass during the past six years, for in 1958 there started the continuing round of international negotiations directed towards the creation of an effective underground test-ban treaty. During the conduct of these negotiations, it has been repeatedly necessary to assess the current state-of-the-art in seismology and its sister geophysical sciences, for the only detectable signals known to propagate for several hundreds to thousands of miles from underground nuclear tests are seismic in nature. With the United States policy being only to seek an underground-test-ban agreement incorporating strong safeguards against acts of bad faith, it is important that the political safe-guards be backed up by those of a geophysical nature.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Knight

This paper takes stock of the current state-of-the-art in multimodal corpus linguistics, and proposes some projections of future developments in this field. It provides a critical overview of key multimodal corpora that have been constructed over the past decade and presents a wish-list of future technological and methodological advancements that may help to increase the availability, utility and functionality of such corpora for linguistic research.


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 65-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Gatt ◽  
Emiel Krahmer

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past two decades, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of NLP, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.


Author(s):  
Oscar D. Sánchez ◽  
Manuel E. Mendoza ◽  
Teodoro Carlón-Allende ◽  
José Villanueva-Díaz

Dendroclimatology has gained relevance during the XXI century. We analyze the state of-the-art of dendroclimatology in Latin America during the past 28 years (1990 to 2019), identifying the current state and recent advances in the application of dendroclimatology in this region. We carried out a systematic review in ScienceDirect, Web of Science, and Scopus databases using Boolean operators to logically connect the keywords “dendrochronology,” “dendroclimatology,” “trend,” “climatic variability,” and “climatic variability trend”, for each country. Dendroclimatological research conducted in the region focused on climatic reconstruction and the evaluation of new tree species with dendrochronological potential, which increase in 2010, then there was a gap between 1995 and 1996, later increase to present. Dendroclimatological studies in Latin America have been mainly developed in temperate climate zones (82.4 %) followed by tropical or subtropical areas (17.6 %). Dendroclimatological research in Latin America has provided advances in the study of climate variability by defining response functions of tree rings to climate. The generated information allows for a better understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of climatic variability and about its effects on ecosystems and society. We also call for increased dendroclimatological research based on subtropical and tropical forests limited studied until today.


Author(s):  
Florian Krampe ◽  
Ashok Swain

For international and domestic actors, postconflict situations constitute one of the most difficult policy arenas to understand and operate within. In this context, the sustainable management of natural resources to prevent conflict and build peace—before, during, or after conflict—has received increasing scholarly attention over the past three decades. Emphasizing the potential for environmental cooperation to support peace and stability, researchers have focused on the ecological foundations for a socially, economically, and politically resilient peace. This chapter takes stock of the current state of the art on environmental peacebuilding, providing a summary of the most common definitions before looking back at the development of environmental peacebuilding along the two most noticeable perspectives and the remaining challenges and pathways for future research.


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