CSM25 : Reading List

The reading list includes all the sources I have used designing the course.

Strongly recommended books

I apologise for not having a very good recommendation for core reading. I am still revising the syllabus, and none of the available books include more than a few chapters which will be handled in depth.

The four books below are very good, and potentially relevant for more than one of your modules. I appreciate that most of you cannot afford to buy all four, but you should at least have a look at all of them in the library or borrow from a fellow student who has bought different books.

• Ingemar Cox, Matthew Miller, Jeffrey Bloom, Jessica Fridrich, and Ton Kalker: Digital Watermarking and Steganography. Source code for the examples is available from the publisher website. This book (edition) only appeared on the market in November 2007. The first edition gave a very good, technical coverage of basic watermarking techniques. The second edition has been extended by including (image) steganography. Unfortunately there are only two chapters on steganography.
• Peter Wayner: Disappearing Cryptography 2nd edition 2002. ISBN 1-55860-769-2. This is a good book, which includes philosophical and political issues related to secret writing, and it is not limited to watermarking-based steganography.
• Rafael C. Gonzalez and Richard E. Woods and Steven L. Eddins: Digital image processing : using MATLAB, ISBN 0130085197, c2004. UniS library shelf: 621.3670285. This book will explain you the basics of matlab and image processing, and if you are to do exercises in Matlab, you may find it essential.
• The Code Book by Simon Singh. ISBN 1-85702-889-9. Popular introduction to cryptography and, to some extent, steganography. This is an easy read, and fills you in on the background and history of secret writing. It is very good as bedside reading.

Additional books

• Pfleeger & Pfleeger: Security in Computing 4th edition, Chapter 1. (This was part of CSM27, included for the benefit of those who have not read it in the Autumn.) It is important to understand and correctly use the terminology of threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks.
• Stefan Katzenbeisser and Fabien Petitcolas: Information Hiding (primarily chapter 1-4) ISBN 1-58053-035-4
• David Kahn: The Codebreakers The Story of Secret Writing. 2nd edition 1996. This is a comprehensive history of secret writing, and the first edition of this book was unusual in drawing attention to Steganography in the sixties at a time when few new what it was, and even fewer used it.
• Gouri K. Bhattacharyya and Richard A. Johnson: Statistical Concepts and Methods (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics). You may want to read some of the basic statistics. This is an excellent book with an unreasonable price tag. Other introductory books (from the library) are probably just as good.
• Raymond Hill: A first course in coding theory. Oxford Applied Mathematics and Computing Science Series. 1986 This is a basic, mathematical introduction to coding theory, for those who want a bit more foundation to understand the for matrix coding.

Core reading -- Papers

• Niels Provos and Peter Honeyman: `Hide and Seek: An Introduction to Steganography' in IEEE Security and Privacy May/June 2003. Available from: IEEE Explore Keywords: Steganography and -analysis in JPEG, JSteg, OutGuess, F5
• J Fridrich, M Goljan, D Hogea, D Soukal: `Quantitative steganalysis of digital images: estimating the secret message length' in Multimedia Systems 2003. From the web page of J Fridrich Keywords: RS steganalysis of LSB in spatial domain; steganalysis of palette images; steganalysis of JPEG.
• Andreas Westfeld: «F5—A Steganographic Algorithm. High Capacity Despite Better Steganalysis» in I. S. Moskowitz (Ed.): Information Hiding 2001, LNCS 2137, pp. 289–302. local copy (restricted)

Papers for background reading

• Jessica Fridrich, Miroslav Goljan, Dorin Hogea: «Steganalysis of JPEG Images: Breaking the F5 Algorithm» 5th Information Hiding Workshop, Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, 7–9 October 2002, pp. 310-323 from author's web page
• J Fridrich and M Goljan and Rui Du: `Detecting LSB steganography in color, and gray-scale images' in IEEE Multimedia Oct.-Dec. 2001. Available from: IEEE Explore Keywords: RS steganalysis.
• Michael Backes and Christian Cachin: `Public-Key Steganography with Active Attacks'. in Theory of Cryptography, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 3378/2005. local copy (restricted)
• Jessica Fridrich, Miroslav Goljan, David Soukal: `Higher-Order Statistical Steganalysis of Palette Images' Proc. SPIE Electronic Imaging, Jan 2003, pp. 178-190. PDF from author's web site
• Andreas Westfeld and Andreas Pfitzmann: `Attacks on Steganographic Systems' in Workshop on Information Hiding LNCS 1768 (2000). http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/487-s06/westfeld-pfitzmann-ihw99.pdf
• Claude E Shannon: `A Mathematical Theory of Communication' in The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948. (PDF from Bell Labs)

Other sources

• Fabien Petitcolas: La Cryptographie Militaire (English and French).
• (Auguste Kerckhoff: «La Cryptographie Militaire» in French, cf. Petitcolas above.)
• Jessica Fridrich: EECE 562: Fundamentals of Steganography (Module website at the University of Binghamton, NY, USA)
• (Ben Johnsen: Kryptografi (Norwegian))
• Source Code (Java) for EzStego (http://www.securityfocus.com/data/tools/EzStego.zip)

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