Ant system based steganography

Code in this repository is the implementation of my master's thesis on the use of ant colony optimization in image steganography. It is written in Rust.

How to run

Building and running locally

This steps assume you have rust toolchain installed. If not, head over to official installation guide. Or go to Building inside docker section.

Building the binary

# after cloning the repository
cargo build --release

Running the app

# using the build binary
./target/release/stegano-ants <app-arguments>

# or without specyfing full path
cargo run --release -- <app-arguments>

Building inside docker

If for some reason you do not want to install rust toolchain, you can always build the image inside docker container with the provided Dockerfile.

Building the binary

docker build -t ants --target runner .

Running the app

docker run \
    --rm \
    -v `pwd`:/usr/src/stegano-ants \
    ants stegano-ants <app-arguments>

App arguments

Application takes in arguments which configure the ant colony and embedding/extraction process.

Example of embedding:

(In the following examples replace stegano-ants with a way of running the app of your choice from steps above).

stegano-ants \
    --ants=1000 \
    --cycles=10 \
    --steps=100 \
    --dispatcher=basic: \
    --updater=const:1.0,0.001,0.5 \
    --mask-width=100 \
    --target-capacity=10000B \
    embed \
    --data assets/data/lorem_ipsum_large.txt \
    --image assets/images/house/house-m.bmp

Example of extracting:

stegano-ants \
    --ants=1000 \
    --cycles=10 \
    --steps=100 \
    --dispatcher=basic: \
    --updater=const:1.0,0.001,0.5 \
    --mask-width=100 \
    --target-capacity=10000B \
    extract \
    --steg assets/images/house/house-m_steg.bmp \
    --image assets/images/house/house-m.bmp

For help run:

stegano-ants --help

For convenience, in bash you can also store arguments inside args.txt, and invoke the app as follows:

stegano-ants `cat args.txt | grep -v ^#`

Output

In embedding mode, two images will be generated. They will be placed in the same directory as transport image.

• <image_name>_steg.bmp - steganogram containing the hidden message
• <image_name>_pher.bmp - visualization of the pheromone trail created by ants, for development purposes only

In extract mode the secret message will be printed to stdout.