Further study on the security of S-UNIWARD

Recently, a new steganographic method was introduced that utilizes a universal distortion function called UNIWARD. The distortion between the cover and stego image is computed as a sum of relative changes of wavelet coefficients representing both images. As already pointed out in the original publication, the selection channel of the spatial version of UNIWARD (the version that hides messages in pixel values called S-UNIWARD) exhibits unusual properties – in highly textured and noisy regions the embedding probabilities form interleaved streaks of low and high embedding probability. While the authors of UNIWARD themselves hypothesized that such an artifact in the embedding probabilities may jeopardize its security, experiments with state-of-the-art rich models did not reveal any weaknesses. Using the fact that the cover embedding probabilities can be approximately estimated from the stego image, we introduce the novel concept of content-selective residuals and successfully attack S-UNIWARD. We also show that this attack, which is made possible by a faulty probabilistic selection channel, can be prevented by properly adjusting the stabilizing constant in the UNIWARD distortion function.