Deceit: Discreet Communication on Twitter via Error-resistant Steganography

Abstract

Amidst online surveillance activities by government agencies and other malevolent entities, Twitter’s lack of encryption on their Direct Messaging feature calls for a solution to protect their users’ privacy when communicating on the online social network. Deceit is a Google Chrome steganography extension which enables Twitter users to communicate discreetly by concealing their messages inside JPEG images. It employs image processing techniques such as pre-emptive resizing, pre-emptive JPEG encoding, and progressive-to-baseline JPEG transcoding to manage the amount of errors on the message normally introduced by the separate image processing Twitter performs on images. It also employs Modified Linear Block Codes to avoid stuck bits on JPEG steganography and to apply forward error correction if necessary.