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Removing Stegomalware from Digital Image Files

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Advances in IoT and Security with Computational Intelligence (ICAISA 2023)

Abstract

Steganography, a data hiding technique, has trended into a lucrative means to hide malware within digital media and other files to avoid detection. Such malware hidden by means of steganography is known as stegomalware. Detecting stegomalware has been difficult and indeed removing such malware from the file is a big challenge. A tool has been created (Verma V, Muttoo SK, Singh VB Detecting stegomalware: malicious image steganography and its intrusion in windows. In: International conference on security, privacy and data analytics. Springer, Singapore (2022). 10.1007/978–981-16–9089-1_9) to detect such malware hidden within widely used JPEG file format. This paper introduces new and significant functionality to our tool (Verma V, Muttoo SK, Singh VB Detecting stegomalware: malicious image steganography and its intrusion in windows. In: International conference on security, privacy and data analytics. Springer, Singapore (2022). 10.1007/978–981-16–9089-1_9) to remove such malware from the file after detection, unlike the existing techniques limited to detection. The tool proposed in this paper has rendered the malicious image files benign with a success rate of 99.92%.

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Acknowledgements

The authors have contributed to the research without any conflict of interest. The authors are grateful to VirusShare.com [27] and Hybrid-Analysis.com [28] for providing access to their malware repositories. The research, to mention, has not received any grant from any funding agency in the commercial, public, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Correspondence to Vinita Verma .

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Verma, V., Muttoo, S.K., Singh, V.B., Sharma, M. (2023). Removing Stegomalware from Digital Image Files. In: Mishra, A., Gupta, D., Chetty, G. (eds) Advances in IoT and Security with Computational Intelligence. ICAISA 2023. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 755. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5085-0_2

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