MP3stego
When looking at the steganographic tools available on the Net, it occurred to
me that nothing had been done to hide information in MP3 files, that is sound
tracks compressed using the MPEG Audio Layer III format. There is a growing
interest world-wide in MP3 or indeed WMA files because
they offer near-CD quality at compression ratio of 11 to 1 (128 kilobits per
second). This gives a very good opportunity for information hiding. Although WMA has better quality in general, I did not
have access to code and only an implementation for MP3 is provided as a proof of concept.
MP3Stego will hide information in MP3 files during the compression process.
The data is first compressed, encrypted and then hidden in the MP3 bit stream.
Although MP3Stego has been written with steganographic applications in mind it
might be used as a copyright marking system for MP3 files (weak but still much
better than the MPEG copyright flag defined by the standard). Any opponent can
uncompress the bit stream and recompress it; this will delete the hidden
information – actually this is the only attack we know yet – but at the expense
of severe quality loss.
The hiding process takes place at the heart of the Layer III encoding
process namely in the inner_loop. The inner loop quantizes the input
data and increases the quantiser step size until the quantized data can be
coded with the available number of bits. Another loop checks that the
distortions introduced by the quantization do not exceed the threshold defined
by the psycho acoustic model. The part2_3_length variable contains the number of main_data bits used for
scalefactors and Huffman code data in the MP3 bit stream. We encode the bits as
its parity by changing the end loop condition of the inner loop. Only randomly
chosen part2_3_length values are modified; the selection is done using a
pseudo random bit generator based on SHA-1.
We have discussed earlier the power of parity for
information hiding. MP3Stego is a practical example of it. There is still space
for improvement but I thought that some people might be interested to have a
look at it.
Compilation
Full C code and binaries (last update November 2018):MP3Stego 1.1.19 for Windows
(Be aware that there are some issues on certain configurations when trying to
decode the data. I do not have time to look at this at the moment Sorry. The
source code is available though...). This program can easily be compiled
using the freely available
Microsoft Visual Studio.
Usage examplecompresses svega.wav (mono, 44.1 kHz, 16bit encoded) and hides
hidden_text.txt. The hidden text is encrypted using pass as a
password. This produces the output called svega_stego.mp3. If no information was hidden, you would obtain this.
decode -X -P pass svega_stego.mp3
uncompresses svega_stego.mp3 into svega_stego.mp3.pcm and attempts to
extract hidden information. The hidden message is decrypted, uncompressed and
saved into svega_stego.mp3.txt.
Feedback
Don’t forget to let me know your suggestions and comments:
fabien18@petitcolas.net