Digital Image Steganographer Identification:A Comprehensive Survey

The rapid development of the internet and digital media has provided convenience while also posing a potential risk of steganography abuse.Identifying steganographer is essential in tracing secret information origins and preventing illicit covert communication online.Accurately discerning a steganographer from many normal users is challenging due to various factors,such as the complexity in obtaining the steganography algorithm,extracting highly separability features,and modeling the cover data.After extensive exploration,several methods have been proposed for steganographer identification.This paper presents a survey of existing studies.Firstly,we provide a concise introduction to the research background and outline the issue of steganographer identification.Secondly,we present fundamental concepts and techniques that establish a general framework for identifying steganographers.Within this framework,state-of-the-art methods are summarized from five key aspects:data acquisition,feature extraction,feature optimization,identification paradigm,and performance evaluation.Furthermore,theoretical and experimental analyses examine the advantages and limitations of these existing methods.Finally,the survey highlights outstanding issues in image steganographer identification that deserve further research.

Integrating Neighborhood Geographic Distribution and Social Structure Influence for Social Media User Geolocation

Geolocating social media users aims to discover the real geographical locations of users from their publicly available data,which can support online location-based applications such as disaster alerts and local content recommen-dations.Social relationship-based methods represent a classical approach for geolocating social media.However,geographically proximate relationships are sparse and challenging to discern within social networks,thereby affecting the accuracy of user geolocation.To address this challenge,we propose user geolocation methods that integrate neighborhood geographical distribution and social structure influence(NGSI)to improve geolocation accuracy.Firstly,we propose a method for evaluating the homophily of locations based on the k-order neighbor-hood geographic distribution(k-NGD)similarity among users.There are notable differences in the distribution of k-NGD similarity between location-proximate and non-location-proximate users.Exploiting this distinction,we filter out non-location-proximate social relationships to enhance location homophily in the social network.To better utilize the location-proximate relationships in social networks,we propose a graph neural network algorithm based on the social structure influence.The algorithm enables us to perform a weighted aggregation of the information of users’multi-hop neighborhood,thereby mitigating the over-smoothing problem of user features and improving user geolocation performance.Experimental results on real social media dataset demonstrate that the neighborhood geographical distribution similarity metric can effectively filter out non-location-proximate social relationships.Moreover,compared with 7 existing social relationship-based user positioning methods,our proposed method can achieve multi-granularity user geolocation and improve the accuracy by 4.84%to 13.28%.

Localization Algorithm of Indoor Wi-Fi Access Points Based on Signal Strength Relative Relationship and Region Division

Precise localization techniques for indoor Wi-Fi access points(APs)have important application in the security inspection.However,due to the interference of environment factors such as multipath propagation and NLOS(Non-Line-of-Sight),the existing methods for localization indoor Wi-Fi access points based on RSS ranging tend to have lower accuracy as the RSS(Received Signal Strength)is difficult to accurately measure.Therefore,the localization algorithm of indoor Wi-Fi access points based on the signal strength relative relationship and region division is proposed in this paper.The algorithm hierarchically divide the room where the target Wi-Fi AP is located,on the region division line,a modified signal collection device is used to measure RSS in two directions of each reference point.All RSS values are compared and the region where the RSS value has the relative largest signal strength is located as next candidate region.The location coordinate of the target Wi-Fi AP is obtained when the localization region of the target Wi-Fi AP is successively approximated until the candidate region is smaller than the accuracy threshold.There are 360 experiments carried out in this paper with 8 types of Wi-Fi APs including fixed APs and portable APs.The experimental results show that the average localization error of the proposed localization algorithm is 0.30 meters,and the minimum localization error is 0.16 meters,which is significantly higher than the localization accuracy of the existing typical indoor Wi-Fi access point localization methods.

Street-Level Landmarks Acquisition Based on SVM Classifiers

High-density street-level reliable landmarks are one of the important foundations for street-level geolocation.However,the existing methods cannot obtain enough street-level landmarks in a short period of time.In this paper,a street-level landmarks acquisition method based on SVM(Support Vector Machine)classifiers is proposed.Firstly,the port detection results of IPs with known services are vectorized,and the vectorization results are used as an input of the SVM training.Then,the kernel function and penalty factor are adjusted for SVM classifiers training,and the optimal SVM classifiers are obtained.After that,the classifier sequence is constructed,and the IPs with unknown service are classified using the sequence.Finally,according to the domain name corresponding to the IP,the relationship between the classified server IP and organization name is established.The experimental results in Guangzhou and Wuhan city in China show that the proposed method can be as a supplement to existing typical methods since the number of obtained street-level landmarks is increased substantially,and the median geolocation error using evaluated landmarks is reduced by about 2 km.

Street-Level IP Geolocation Algorithm Based on Landmarks Clustering

Existing IP geolocation algorithms based on delay similarity often rely on the principle that geographically adjacent IPs have similar delays.However,this principle is often invalid in real Internet environment,which leads to unreliable geolocation results.To improve the accuracy and reliability of locating IP in real Internet,a street-level IP geolocation algorithm based on landmarks clustering is proposed.Firstly,we use the probes to measure the known landmarks to obtain their delay vectors,and cluster landmarks using them.Secondly,the landmarks are clustered again by their latitude and longitude,and the intersection of these two clustering results is taken to form training sets.Thirdly,we train multiple neural networks to get the mapping relationship between delay and location in each training set.Finally,we determine one of the neural networks for the target by the delay similarity and relative hop counts,and then geolocate the target by this network.As it brings together the delay and geographical coordinates clustering,the proposed algorithm largely improves the inconsistency between them and enhances the mapping relationship between them.We evaluate the algorithm by a series of experiments in Hong Kong,Shanghai,Zhengzhou and New York.The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves street-level IP geolocation,and comparing with existing typical streetlevel geolocation algorithms,the proposed algorithm improves the geolocation reliability significantly.

Multiple Images Steganography of JPEG Images Based on Optimal Payload Distribution

Multiple images steganography refers to hiding secret messages in multiple natural images to minimize the leakage of secret messages during transmission.Currently,the main multiple images steganography algorithms mainly distribute the payloads as sparsely as possible inmultiple cover images to improve the detection error rate of stego images.In order to enable the payloads to be accurately and efficiently distributed in each cover image,this paper proposes a multiple images steganography for JPEG images based on optimal payload redistribution.Firstly,the algorithm uses the principle of dynamic programming to redistribute the payloads of the cover images to reduce the time required in the process of payloads distribution.Then,by reducing the difference between the features of the cover images and the stego images to increase the detection error rate of the stego images.Secondly,this paper uses a data decomposition mechanism based on Vandermonde matrix.Even if part of the data is lost during the transmission of the secret messages,as long as the data loss rate is less than the data redundancy rate,the original secret messages can be recovered.Experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper improves the efficiency of payloads distribution compared with existing multiple images steganography.At the same time,the algorithm can achieve the optimal payload distribution of multiple images steganography to improve the anti-statistical detection performance of stego images.

Extracting embedded messages using adaptive steganography based on optimal syndrome-trellis decoding paths

Privacy protection is the key to maintaining the Internet of Things(IoT)communication strategy.Steganography is an important way to achieve covert communication that protects user data privacy.Steganalysis technology is the key to checking steganography security,and its ultimate goal is to extract embedded messages.Existing methods cannot extract under known cover images.To this end,this paper proposes a method of extracting embedded messages under known cover images.First,the syndrome-trellis encoding process is analyzed.Second,a decoding path in the syndrome trellis is obtained by using the stego sequence and a certain parity-check matrix,while the embedding process is simulated using the cover sequence and parity-check matrix.Since the decoding path obtained by the stego sequence and the correct parity-check matrix is optimal and has the least distortion,comparing the path consistency can quickly filter the coding parameters to determine the correct matrices,and embedded messages can be extracted correctly.The proposed method does not need to embed all possible messages for the second time,improving coding parameter recognition significantly.The experimental results show that the proposed method can identify syndrome-trellis coding parameters in stego images embedded by adaptive steganography quickly to realize embedded message extraction.

Color Image Steganalysis Based on Residuals of Channel Differences

This study proposes a color image steganalysis algorithm that extracts highdimensional rich model features from the residuals of channel differences.First,the advantages of features extracted from channel differences are analyzed,and it shown that features extracted in this manner should be able to detect color stego images more effectively.A steganalysis feature extraction method based on channel differences is then proposed,and used to improve two types of typical color image steganalysis features.The improved features are combined with existing color image steganalysis features,and the ensemble classifiers are trained to detect color stego images.The experimental results indicate that,for WOW and S-UNIWARD steganography,the improved features clearly decreased the average test errors of the existing features,and the average test errors of the proposed algorithm is smaller than those of the existing color image steganalysis algorithms.Specifically,when the payload is smaller than 0.2 bpc,the average test error decreases achieve 4%and 3%.

Interest Points Analysis for Internet Forum Based on Long-Short Windows Similarity

For Internet forum Points of Interest(PoI),existing analysis methods are usually lack of usability analysis under different conditions and ignore the long-term variation,which lead to blindness in method selection.To address this problem,this paper proposed a PoI variation prediction framework based on similarity analysis between long and short windows.Based on the framework,this paper presented 5 PoI analysis algorithms which can be categorized into 2 types,i.e.,the traditional sequence analysis methods such as autoregressive integrated moving average model(ARIMA),support vector regressor(SVR),and the deep learning methods such as convolutional neural network(CNN),long-short term memory network(LSTM),Transformer(TRM).Specifically,this paper firstly divides observed data into long and short windows,and extracts key words as PoI of each window.Then,the PoI similarities between long and short windows are calculated for training and prediction.Finally,series of experiments is conducted based on real Internet forum datasets.The results show that,all the 5 algorithms could predict PoI variations well,which indicate effectiveness of the proposed framework.When the length of long window is small,traditional methods perform better,and SVR is the best.On the contrary,the deep learning methods show superiority,and LSTM performs best.The results could provide beneficial references for PoI variation analysis and prediction algorithms selection under different parameter configurations.

Median Filtering Detection Based on Quaternion Convolutional Neural Network

Median filtering is a nonlinear signal processing technique and has an advantage in the field of image anti-forensics.Therefore,more attention has been paid to the forensics research of median filtering.In this paper,a median filtering forensics method based on quaternion convolutional neural network(QCNN)is proposed.The median filtering residuals(MFR)are used to preprocess the images.Then the output of MFR is expanded to four channels and used as the input of QCNN.In QCNN,quaternion convolution is designed that can better mix the information of different channels than traditional methods.The quaternion pooling layer is designed to evaluate the result of quaternion convolution.QCNN is proposed to features well combine the three-channel information of color image and fully extract forensics features.Experiments show that the proposed method has higher accuracy and shorter training time than the traditional convolutional neural network with the same convolution depth.

An anonymous authentication and secure data transmission scheme for the Internet of Things based on blockchain

With the widespread use of network infrastructures such as 5G and low-power wide-area networks,a large number of the Internet of Things(IoT)device nodes are connected to the network,generating massive amounts of data.Therefore,it is a great challenge to achieve anonymous authentication of IoT nodes and secure data transmission.At present,blockchain technology is widely used in authentication and s data storage due to its decentralization and immutability.Recently,Fan et al.proposed a secure and efficient blockchain-based IoT authentication and data sharing scheme.We studied it as one of the state-of-the-art protocols and found that this scheme does not consider the resistance to ephemeral secret compromise attacks and the anonymity of IoT nodes.To overcome these security flaws,this paper proposes an enhanced authentication and data transmission scheme,which is verified by formal security proofs and informal security analysis.Furthermore,Scyther is applied to prove the security of the proposed scheme.Moreover,it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme achieves better performance in terms of communication and computational cost compared to other related schemes.

An accurate identification method for network devices based on spatial attention mechanism

With the metaverse being the development direction of the next generation Internet,the popularity of intelligent devices,and the maturity of various emerging technologies,more and more intelligent devices try to connect to the Internet,which poses a major threat to the management and security protection of network equipment.At present,the mainstream method of network equipment identification in the metaverse is to obtain the network traffic data generated in the process of device communication,extract the device features through analysis and processing,and identify the device based on a variety of learning algorithms.Such methods often require manual participation,and it is difficult to capture the small differences between similar devices,leading to identification errors.Therefore,we propose a deep learning device recognition method based on a spatial attention mechanism.Firstly,we extract the required feature fields from the acquired network traffic data.Then,we normalize the data and convert it into grayscale images.After that,we add a spatial attention mechanism to CNN and MLP respectively to increase the difference between similar network devices and further improve the recognition accuracy.Finally,we identify devices based on the deep learning model.A large number of experiments were carried out on 31 types of network devices such as web cameras,wireless routers,and smartwatches.The results show that the accuracy of the proposed recognition method based on the spatial attention mechanism is increased by 0.8%and 2.0%,respectively,compared with the recognition method based only on the deep learning model under the CNN and MLP models.The method proposed in this paper is significantly superior to the existing method of device-type recognition based only on a deep learning model.

NEXT:a neural network framework for next POI recommendation

The task of next POI recommendations has been studied extensively in recent years.However,developing a unified recommendation framework to incorporate multiple factors associated with both POIs and users remains challenging,because of the heterogeneity nature of these information.Further,effective mechanisms to smoothly handle cold-start cases are also a difficult topic.Inspired by the recent success of neural networks in many areas,in this paper,we propose a simple yet effective neural network framework,named NEXT,for next POI recommendations.NEXT is a unified framework to learn the hidden intent regarding user's next move,by incorporating different factors in a unified manner.Specifically,in NEXT,we incorporate meta-data information,e.g.,user friendship and textual descriptions of POIs,and two kinds of temporal contexts(i.e.,time interval and visit time).To leverage sequential relations and geographical influence,we propose to adopt DeepWalk,a network representation learning technique,to encode such knowledge.We evaluate the effectiveness of NEXT against other state-of-the-art alternatives and neural networks based solutions.Experimental results on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that NEXT significantly outperforms baselines in real-time next POI recommendations.Further experiments show inherent ability of NEXT in handling cold-start.

IP-geolocater:a more reliable IP geolocation algorithm based on router error training

Location based services(LBS)are widely utilized,and determining the location of users’IP is the foundation for LBS.Constrained by unstable delay and insufficient landmarks,the existing geolocation algorithms have problems such as low geolocation accuracy and uncertain geolocation error,difficult to meet the requirements of LBS for accuracy and reliability.A new IP geolocation algorithm based on router error training is proposed in this manuscript to improve the accuracy of geolocation results and obtain the current geolocation error range.Firstly,bootstrapping is utilized to divide the landmark data into training set and verification set,and/24 subnet distribution is utilized to extend the training set.Secondly,the path detection is performed on nodes in the three data sets respectively to extract the metropolitan area network(MAN)of the target city,and the geolocation result and error of each router in MAN are obtained by training the detection results.Finally,the MAN is utilized to get the target’s location.Based on China’s 24,254 IP geolocation experiments,the proposed algorithm has higher geolocation accuracy and lower median error than existing typical geolocation algorithms LBG,SLG,NNG and RNBG,and in most cases the difference is less than 10km between estimated error and actual error.

基于视频流谱特征空间的深度伪造检测

随着深度伪造技术的快速发展,深度伪造视频在每一帧上表现得极为真实,现有检测方法难以有效识别出深度伪造视频.针对这一问题,本文首次提出了一种基于视频流谱特征空间的深度伪造检测方法.该方法基于流谱理论构建了一个视频流谱特征空间,通过视频流谱基底模型将视频流从视频特征隐空间映射到视频流谱特征空间,精准刻画视频流中不一致性信息,获取可分离度更高的视频流谱不一致性特征,从而实现深度伪造视频的检测.具体而言,首先提出了一种视频流谱特征空间的构建方法,通过对视频特征隐空间进行基底映射,得到一个近似同构的视频流谱特征描述空间,在视频流谱特征空间中融合视频流不同视角的高维表征,实现对视频流的精准刻画与分析;然后设计了一个视频不一致性流谱映射模型,通过视频流谱变换算子,从时序角度将视频流的空域信息聚合映射到视频流谱特征空间,建模深度伪造视频的不一致性信息,构建数据可分离度更高的视频表征.实验结果表明,所提方法在Celeb-DF数据集上达到99.23%的准确率,在DFDC数据集上达到95.24%的准确率.