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Linguistic steganalysis using the features derived from synonym frequency

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Abstract

A linguistic steganalysis method is proposed to detect synonym substitution-based steganography, which embeds secret message into a text by substituting words with their synonyms. First, attribute pair of a synonym is introduced to represent its position in an ordered synonym set sorting in descending frequency order and the number of its synonyms. As a result of synonym substitutions, the number of high frequency attribute pairs may be reduced while the number of low frequency attribute pairs would be increased. By theoretically analyzing the changes of the statistical characteristics of attribute pairs caused by SS steganography, a feature vector based on the difference of the relative frequencies of different attribute pairs is utilized to detect the secret message. Finally, the impact on the extracted feature vector caused by synonym coding strategies is analyzed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed linguistic steganalysis method can achieve better detection performance than previous methods.

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Notes

  1. Synset is defined as a set of words with identical or similar meanings

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 60973128, 61073191, 61070196, 61070195, 61103215, 61173141, 61173142, and 61232016), National Basic Research Program 973 of China (Nos. 2010CB334706, and 2011CB311808), 2011GK2009, GYHY201206033, 201301030, 0S2013GR0445 and PAPD fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer and Communication Engineering, Changsha University of Science & Technology, Changsha, Hunan, 410004, China

    Lingyun Xiang

  2. Jiangsu Engineering Center of Network Monitoring, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Xingming Sun

  3. College of Information Science and Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China

    Gang Luo & Bin Xia

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  1. Lingyun Xiang
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  2. Xingming Sun
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  3. Gang Luo
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  4. Bin Xia
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Correspondence to Xingming Sun.

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Xiang, L., Sun, X., Luo, G. et al. Linguistic steganalysis using the features derived from synonym frequency. Multimed Tools Appl 71, 1893–1911 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1313-8

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