Evading
Online
Keyword
Censorship
Sensitive information, such as banned books and protest organization communications, require secure channels to evade private or state surveillance. However, public access to secure communication channels is under threat for people all around the world. Steganography is the art of concealing the existence of information in seemingly innocent media such as texts, studios, photos, and videos. This project aims to provide public access to a secure steganographic system for additional privacy in communications and underground publishing.
Media Summary
A narrated presentation about the research topic submitted to the University of Washington Undergraduate Research Symposium.
A demo video that shows the live site's embedding and extraction flow.
Abstract
Internet censorship is often enforced via automated keyword filtering with a keyword list, implemented on a platform or state level. Individual users who discuss “sensitive” issues online may find their social media posts are made invisible or removed and may even have their accounts shut down.
In this literature, we propound steganography as a publishing infrastructure against internet keyword censorship. We conducted an experiment to confirm our hypothesis that steganography is a viable way to transmit sensitive information over censored networks. The end product is a publicly available, online steganography tool equipped with an improved version of an existing steganographic algorithm that uses random pixel selection to minimize noise in the stego image. We evaluated the proposed method against its predecessors and found that our method gives a higher quality of stego images in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and other common metrics used to measure image steganographic systems.