Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Latest release: Version 1.0, 1997-11-10
StirMark is a generic tool for simple robustness testing of image watermarking algorithms and other steganographic techniques. It can be applied to photographic digital images and it will distort the watermark of too simplistic marking techniques such that the embedded watermark or steganographic message cannot any more be detected and decoded from the result image.
StirMark is freely available under the GNU General Public Licence in full portable ISO C source code from
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/
StirMark reads and writes arbitrary images in the PGM and PPM file formats as they are used in Jef Poskanzer’s pbmplus Extended Portable Bitmap Toolkit. These are trivially simple file formats, and the various PBM toolkits contain converters between these formats and practically any other commonly used graphics file format. This way, StirMark can be easily used to process any format on any platform.
PBM tools are for instance available from
http://freecode.com/projects/netpbm ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/packages/pbmplus/pbmplus10dec91.tar.Z ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/.b/X11-contrib/pbmplus10dec91.tar.Z ftp://oak.oakland.edu/pub/msdos/graphics/pbmp191d.zip
but you will need these tools only if you do not already have other image processing software that can handle the PPM or PGM file formats.
You can specify an input and an output file name in the command line. If you omit any of those, stdin and stdout are used instead respectively.
The available command line options (normally not needed, for experts only) are
Normally you do not have to use any of those options and you should try the default values first. If this does not remove the watermark, then the embedding algorithm is not too bad and you can try to increase the -i value to get a stronger geometric transform. Then try higher -d values to get a more significant color transform or -r with a value slightly below 1.0 to blurr the image somewhat or both. If you want no geometric transform at all, set -i0 and -o0. If you think, StirMark is too slow then try lower values for -n or try -l instead.
For example
stirmark -i0 -o0 -d0 test.ppm output.ppm
does not modify the image at all.
StirMark basically simulates a resampling process, i.e. it introduces the same kind of errors into an image that you would expect if you printed an image on a high-quality printer and then scan the image again with a high-quality scanner. The algorithm applies a minor geometric distortion, i.e. the image is slightly stretched, sheared, shifted, and/or rotated by an unnoticeable random amount and then resampled using Nyquist (or with -l bi-linear) interpolation. In addition, a transfer function that introduces a small and smoothly distributed error into all sample values is applied, which acts like a small non-linear analog/digital converter imperfection typically found in scanners and display devices.
StirMark introduces a practically unnoticeable quality loss in the image if it is applied only once. However after a few iterated applications of the algorithm, the image degradation becomes soon very noticeable. This makes StirMark (especially the -d option) also a model for algorithms that can be applied to artificially degrade images on replay to get rid of the lossless-copying property of digital multimedia objects.
StirMark is a generic steganographic attack tool in that it is not targeted against any specific steganographic algorithm. I hope to establish with StirMark a reasonable minimum robustness requirement for steganographic image processing tools, i.e. if information embedded by an algorithm into an image does not survive the StirMark process, then the steganographic technique used should considered to be unacceptably easy to break.
Suggestions for improving this software are always welcome. I am also interested in robustness test results obtained by processing with StirMark images that were marked with various available watermarking tools.
Surprisingly, first experiences with various watermarking tools show that the watermarks of *all* tools we have been able to locate (DigiMark, JK_PGS, SysCop, SureSign, etc.) can be made unrecognizeable more or less reliably by StirMark, especially if StirMark is followed by a medium quality JPEG compression. See also Fabien Petitcolas’ web pages about steganography for more information.
If you use StirMark in your scientific work, please quote
Fabien A.P. Petitcolas, Ross J. Anderson, Markus G. Kuhn: Attacks on copyright marking systems, in David Aucsmith (Ed.): Information Hiding, Second International Workshop, IH’98, Portland, Oregon, USA, April 15–17, 1998, Proceedings, LNCS 1525, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 3-540-65386-4, pp. 219–239.
Funding acknowledgement: The author wrote StirMark while being a PhD student supported by a European Commission TMR Marie-Curie grant and is interested in robustness properties of information protection mechanisms.
Update: Maintenance and further development of StirMark was taken over in 1999 by Fabien Petitcolas.
created 1997-11-10 – last modified 1999-02-09 – http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/stirmark.html