This book is the first volume in a series entitled Advances in Information Security. The goal of the series is to capture the state of the art, set the course for future research and serve as a central reference for information security research and developments.

The book has four chapters. The first two chapters describe the methods and objectives of steganography. The third describes, at a high level, how steganography works. The final chapter separates the students from the professors, employing methods and terminology that may seem initially obscure. The notions of flow and affine transformations are applied to an image is distorted by a stenographic transformation, and are used to recover the original image.

The first chapter provides a context for steganography, definitions used in the book and a little history of steganography’s use.

Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the structure of digital images and the data encoding schemes used by various file types. It gives several examples of how to hide data in images and methods of watermarking and explains some of the concepts of image-based steganography and watermarking using a variety of digital image steganongraphic and watermarking software.

Chapter 3 describes the art of steganalysis as attacks against hidden information (steganographic or watermark) in digital images. The objectives of steganalysis are detection or distortion, with distortion applied to watermarks in order to either remove them or to render them useless as a means of “proving” ownership of an image.

Chapter 4 is devoted to the question of how to protect digital media in the face of the attacks described in chapter 3. It addresses how to strengthen information hiding and countermeasures to distortion attacks on carriers suspected of containing digital watermarks.

There are two appendices. The first discusses hiding data in network traffic by using parts of protocols not implemented. The second is a glossary of methods available to distort stego-images.

The book has an extensive set of references and a good index. The publisher offers the book as a secondary text in a graduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in the industry. I would add that the book is a good introduction to the topic, especially since it has so many references to other works. The methods are not developed enough to give the reader a sense of how easy or difficult a particular method would be to incorporate into a given line of research, but they give a new reader a sense of some of the directions the work can take.

Overall, the book is recommended to information security practitioners as a place to start learning about these topics.