2019/12/20 by Isaac Corley, Corley, Isaac, Jonathan Lwowski +3
Computer Science · #Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Digital Media Forensic Detection #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Multimedia (cs.MM) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1912.10070
openalex publication_date 2019/12/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Digital image steganalysis, or the detection of image steganography, has been studied in depth for years and is driven by Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups', such as APT37 Reaper, utilization of steganographic techniques to transmit additional malware to perform further post-exploitation activity on a compromised host. However, many steganalysis algorithms are constrained to work with only a subset of all possible images in the wild or are known to produce a high false positive rate. This results in blocking any suspected image being an unreasonable policy. A more feasible policy is to filter suspicious images prior to reception by the host machine. However, how does one optimally filter specifically to obfuscate or remove image steganography while avoiding degradation of visual image quality in the case that detection of the image was a false positive? We propose the Deep Digital Steganography Purifier (DDSP), a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) which is optimized to destroy steganographic content without compromising the perceptual quality of the original image. As verified by experimental results, our model is capable of providing a high rate of destruction of steganographic image content while maintaining a high visual quality in comparison to other state-of-the-art filtering methods. Additionally, we test the transfer learning capability of generalizing to to obfuscate real malware payloads embedded into different image file formats and types using an unseen steganographic algorithm and prove that our model can in fact be deployed to provide adequate results.