Development of an Efficient Steganalysis Framework for Uncovering Hidden Data in Digital Media (UNCOVER)
Criminals increasingly make use of information hiding techniques (e.g., steganography) to embed secret messages in digital media such as images, video, audio, and text files. This poses new challenges to Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs).
The main objective of the UNCOVER research project is to develop innovations for detecting hidden information (steganalysis) and to increase the technological autonomy of LEAs in the field of digital media steganalysis. With its consortium of 22 partners, which includes LEAs, forensic institutes, leading researchers and software developers as well as technology companies, UNCOVER aims to improve current standards of steganalysis solutions regarding the performance, usability, operational needs, privacy protection, and chain-of-custody considerations.
The University of Innsbruck contributes to the project by carrying out fundamental research in the area of computer science. The main themes of its technical work concern the heterogeneity of cover sources as well as scaling solutions to a large number of steganographic tools and approaches.