IH 2 00 2 P RO CE ED IN G S _ ve r , O ct 2 00 2 , N et he rla nd s

Steganography and steganalysis of digital images is a catand-mouse game. In recent work, Fridrich, Goljan and Du introduced a method that is surprisingly accurate at determining if bitmap images that originated as JPEG les have b en altered (and even specifying where and how they were altered), even if only a single bit has been changed. However, steganographic embeddings that encode embedded data in the JPEG coe cients are not detectable by their JPEG compatibility steganalysis. This paper describes a steganographic method that encodes the embedded data in the spatial domain, yet cannot be detected by their steganalysis mechanism. Furthermore, we claim that our method can also be used as a steganographic method on les stored in JPEG format. The method described herein uses a novel, topological approach to embedding. The paper also outlines some extensions to the proposed embedding method.