Steganography in Social Networks Based on Behavioral Correlation

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a secure steganographic method in social networks based on the behavioral correlation between the sender and his friends. A sender transmits secret data to one of his friends in social network by marking “love” on the news published by his friends. To avoid behavioral abnormality, the sender lets the value of “love” marking probability on each news in proportion to the number of “love” marks made by his friends. As a result, the “love” marks carrying secret data are indistinguishable from other normal “love” marks. Although a receiver does not know the “love” marking probabilities, he can still extract the secret data by observing the “love” marks. The security performance of the proposed steganographic method is satisfactory when examined by a proposed behavioral steganalysis method which is able to defeat existing behavioral steganographic methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Behavior
• correlation
• security
• social network
• steganalysis
• steganography

ORCID

Yinghong Hu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7846-4070

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China [U1936214], [U1636206], [61525203], and the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai [18ZR1427500].

Notes on contributors

Yinghong Hu

Yinghong Hu received the B.S. degree in communication engineering from Shanghai University, China, in 2017. She is currently pursuing the MS degree at Shanghai University, China. Her research interest is behavioral data hiding. E-mail: [email protected]

Zichi Wang

Zichi Wang received the BS degree in electronics and information engineering from Shanghai University, China, in 2014, and the MS degree in signal and information processing from the same university in 2017. He is currently pursuing the PhD degree at Shanghai University, China. His research interests include steganography, steganalysis and reversible data hiding. He has published about 30 papers in these areas. E-mail: [email protected]

Xinpeng Zhang

Xinpeng Zhang received the BS degree in computational mathematics from Jilin University, China, in 1995, and the ME and PhD degrees in communication and information system from Shanghai University, China, in 2001 and 2004, respectively. Since 2004, he has been with the faculty of the School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University, where he is currently a professor. His research interests include information hiding, image processing, and digital forensics. He has published over 200 papers in these areas.