Steganalysis based on JPEG compatibility

In this paper, we introduce a new forensic tool that can reliably detect modifications in digital images, such as distortion due to steganography and watermarking, in images that were originally stored in the JPEG format. The JPEG compression leaves unique fingerprints and serves as a "fragile watermark" enabling us to detect changes as small as modifying the LSB of one randomly chosen pixel. The detection of changes is based on investigating the compatibility of M blocks of pixels with JPEG compression with a given quantization matrix. The proposed steganalytic method is applicable to virtually all steganographic and watermarking algorithms with the exception of those that embed message bits into the quantized JPEG DCT coefficients. The method can also be used to estimate the size of the secret message and identify the pixels that carry message bits. As a consequence of our steganalysis, we strongly recommend avoiding using images that have been originally stored in the JPEG format as cover-images for spatial-domain steganography.