Genetic algorithm-based methodology for breaking the steganalytic systems

Steganography is an ancient art of hiding secret messages within another apparently innocuous carrier in such a way that only the receiver knows the existence of the messages. It is different from cryptography which encodes messages, so that nobody can read it without the specific key. Another technique, digital watermarking (Cox et al., 2001; Wu and Shih, 2004), is concerned with issues related to copyright protection and intellectual property and therefore a watermark usually contains the information regarding the carrier and the owner. The well-known steganographic methods include covert channel, invisible ink, microdot, and spread-spectrum 258communication (Norman, 1973; Kahn, 1996). Although steganography is an ancient subject, computer technology provides a new aspect of applications by hiding messages in the multimedia materials, such as audio and images.