A Graphic User Interface for Rapid Integration of Steganography Software

This is a NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY CA report procured by the Pentagon and made available for public release. It has been reproduced in the best form available to the Pentagon. It is not spiral-bound, but rather assembled with Velobinding in a soft, white linen cover. The Storming Media report number is A186903. The abstract provided by the Pentagon follows: Steganography is a method an individual uses to secretly communicate, whereby the transmitting agent hides a message within some medium, so that only an intended recipient can detect the message's presence. Researchers who apply this methodology to digital imagery currently have no X Windows-based graphic user interface software package through which they may aggregate, test, and demonstrate their steganography programs. Such a package would contain features to encode data to and extract data from digital imagery, convert the files to other graphic file formats, display imagery, and offer some utility to analyze change between unencoded original images and their encoded equivalent. The steganography software development package presented in this thesis, named Steganography Toolbox, satisfies these requirements. It provides the above described features, plus the ability to delete unneeded files, all in an X windows graphic user interface. It permits the user, who writes a separately executable steganography program, to attach it to the graphic interface with little additional programming effort. The thesis describes a method to create a menu-selected dialog box containing the necessary widgets, which invokes the desired program through a system() call. The thesis includes Steganography Toolbox's structured design documentation, from system requirements to process specifications. The thesis also describes how requirements-based software tests were performed on each module to verify proper function and error-handling.