Mohammad Ali Jamshidi; Mohammad Mahdi Mojahedian; Mohammad Reza Aref
Abstract
To enhance the accuracy of learning models, it becomes imperative to train them on more extensive datasets. Unfortunately, access to such data is often restricted because data providers are hesitant to share their data due to privacy concerns. Hence, it ...
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To enhance the accuracy of learning models, it becomes imperative to train them on more extensive datasets. Unfortunately, access to such data is often restricted because data providers are hesitant to share their data due to privacy concerns. Hence, it is critical to develop obfuscation techniques that empower data providers to transform their datasets into new ones that ensure the desired level of privacy. In this paper, we present an approach where data providers utilize a neural network based on the autoencoder architecture to safeguard the sensitive components of their data while preserving the utility of the remaining parts. More specifically, within the autoencoder framework and after the encoding process, a classifier is used to extract the private feature from the dataset. This feature is then decorrelated from the other remaining features and subsequently subjected to noise. The proposed method is flexible, allowing data providers to adjust their desired level of privacy by changing the noise level. Additionally, our approach demonstrates superior performance in achieving the desired trade-off between utility and privacy compared to similar methods, all while maintaining a simpler structure.
Mostafa Chegenizadeh; Mohammad Ali; Javad Mohajeri; Mohammad Reza Aref
Abstract
Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a promising cryptographic mechanism for providing confidentiality and fine-grained access control in the cloud-based area.However, due to high computational overhead, common ABE schemes are not suitable for resource-constrained devices.Additionally, access policies ...
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Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a promising cryptographic mechanism for providing confidentiality and fine-grained access control in the cloud-based area.However, due to high computational overhead, common ABE schemes are not suitable for resource-constrained devices.Additionally, access policies should be able to be updated efficiently by data owners, and in some circumstances, hidden access policies are necessary to preserve the privacy of clients and data.In this paper, we propose a ciphertext-policy attribute-based access control scheme that, for the first time, simultaneously provides online/offline encryption, hidden access policy, and access policy update.In our scheme, resource-constrained devices are equipped with online/offline encryption reducing the encryption overhead significantly.Furthermore, attributes of access policies are hidden such that the attribute sets satisfying an access policy cannot be guessed by other parties.Moreover, data owners can update their defined access policies while outsourcing a major part of the updating process to the cloud service provider.In particular, we introduce blind access policies that enable the cloud service provider to update the data owners' access policies without receiving a new re-encryption key.Besides, our scheme supports fast decryption such that the decryption algorithm consists of a constant number of bilinear pairing operations.The proposed scheme is proven to be secure in the random oracle model and under the hardness of Decisional Bilinear Diffie–Hellman (DBDH) and Decision Linear (D-Linear) assumptions.Also, performance analysis results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is efficient and practical.
Amirhosein Salehi; Siavash Ahmadi; Mohammad Reza Aref
Abstract
Industrial control systems are widely used in industrial sectors and critical infrastructures to monitor and control industrial processes. Recently, the security of industrial control systems has attracted a lot of attention, because these systems are now increasingly interacting with the Internet. Classic ...
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Industrial control systems are widely used in industrial sectors and critical infrastructures to monitor and control industrial processes. Recently, the security of industrial control systems has attracted a lot of attention, because these systems are now increasingly interacting with the Internet. Classic systems are suffering from many security problems and with the expansionof Internet connectivity, they are now exposed to new types of threats and cyber-attacks. Addressing this, intrusion detection technology is one of the most important security solutions that is used in industrial control systems to identifypotential attacks and malicious activities. In this paper, we propose Stacked Autoencoder-Deep Neural Network (SAE-DNN), as a semi-supervised Intrusion Detection System (IDS) with appropriate performance and applicability on a wide range of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). The proposed approach comprises a stacked autoencoder, a deep learning-based feature extractor, helping us with a low dimension and low noise representation of data. In addition, our system includes a deep neural network (DNN)-based classifier, which is used to detect anomalies with a high detection rate and low false positive rate in a real-time process. The SAE-DNN’s performance is evaluated on the WADI dataset, which is a real testbed for a water distribution system. The results indicate the superior performance of our approach over existing supervised and unsupervised methods while using a few percentages of labeled data.
Mojtaba Shirinjani; Siavash Ahmadi; Taraneh Eghlidos; Mohammad Reza Aref
Abstract
Large-scale data collection is challenging in alternative centralized learning as privacy concerns or prohibitive policies may rise. As a solution, Federated Learning (FL) is proposed wherein data owners, called participants, can train a common model collaboratively while their privacy is preserved. ...
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Large-scale data collection is challenging in alternative centralized learning as privacy concerns or prohibitive policies may rise. As a solution, Federated Learning (FL) is proposed wherein data owners, called participants, can train a common model collaboratively while their privacy is preserved. However, recent attacks, namely Membership Inference Attacks (MIA) or Poisoning Attacks (PA), can threaten the privacy and performance in FL systems. This paper develops an innovative Adversarial-Resilient Privacy-preserving Scheme (ARPS) for FL to cope with preceding threats using differential privacy andcryptography. Our experiments display that ARPS can establish a private model with high accuracy outperforming state-of-the-art approaches. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the only scheme providing privacy protection beyond any output models in conjunction with Byzantine resiliency without sacrificing accuracy and efficiency.
Zeinab Salami; Mahmoud Ahmadian Attari; Mohammad Reza Aref; Hoda Jannati
Abstract
Since their introduction, cognitive radio networks, as a new solution to the problem of spectrum scarcity, have received great attention from the research society. An important field in database driven cognitive radio network studies is pivoted on their security issues. A critical issue in this context ...
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Since their introduction, cognitive radio networks, as a new solution to the problem of spectrum scarcity, have received great attention from the research society. An important field in database driven cognitive radio network studies is pivoted on their security issues. A critical issue in this context is user's location privacy, which is potentially under serious threat. The query process by secondary users from the database is one of the points where the problem rises. In this paper, we propose a Privacy Preserving Query Process (PPQP), accordingly. PPQP is a cryptography-based protocol, which takes advantage of properties of some well-known cryptosystems. This method lets secondary users deal in the process of spectrum query without sacrificing their location information. Analytical assessment of PPQP's privacy preservation capability shows that it preserves location privacy for secondary users against different adversaries, with very high probability. Relatively low communicational cost is a significant property of our novel protocol.
Majid Mahmoudzadeh Niknam; Sadegh Sadeghi; Mohammad Reza Aref; Nasour Bagheri
Abstract
In this paper, we present some attacks on GAGE, InGAGE, and CiliPadi which are candidates of the first round of the NIST-LWC competition. GAGE and InGAGE are lightweight sponge based hash function and Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), respectively and support different sets of parameters. ...
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In this paper, we present some attacks on GAGE, InGAGE, and CiliPadi which are candidates of the first round of the NIST-LWC competition. GAGE and InGAGE are lightweight sponge based hash function and Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), respectively and support different sets of parameters. The length of hash, key, and tag are always 256, 128, and 128 bits, respectively. We show that the security bounds for some variants of its hash and AEAD are less than the designers' claims. For example, the designers' security claim of preimage attack for a hash function when the rate is 128 bits and the capacity is $256$ bits, is 2^{256}, however, we show that the security of preimage for this parameter set is 2^{128}. Also, the designer claimed security of confidentiality for an AEAD, when the rate is 8 bits and the capacity is 224 bits, is 2^{116}, however, we show the security of confidentiality for it is 2^{112$. We also investigate the structure of the permutation used in InGAGE and present an attack to recover the key for reduced rounds of a variant of InGAGE. In an instance of AEAD of InGAGE, when the rate is 8 bits and the capacity is 224 bits, we recover the key when the number of the composition of the main permutation with itself, i.e., r_{1}, is less than 8. We also show that CiliPadi is vulnerable to the length extension attack by presenting concrete examples of forged messages.
Mohammad Reza Aref
Abstract
From the Editor-in-Chief
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From the Editor-in-Chief
Mohammad Reza Aref
Abstract
From the Editor-in-Chief
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From the Editor-in-Chief
Majid Bayat; Zahra Zare Jousheghani; Ashok Kumar Das; Pitam Singh; Saru Kumari; Mohammad Reza Aref
Abstract
Smart grid concept is introduced to modify the power grid by utilizing new information and communication technology. Smart grid needs live power consumption monitoring to provide required services and for this issue, bi-directional communication is essential. Security and privacy are the most important ...
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Smart grid concept is introduced to modify the power grid by utilizing new information and communication technology. Smart grid needs live power consumption monitoring to provide required services and for this issue, bi-directional communication is essential. Security and privacy are the most important requirements that should be provided in the communication. Because of the complex design of smart grid systems, and utilizing different new technologies, there are many opportunities for adversaries to attack the smart grid system that can result fatal problems for the customers. A privacy preserving authentication scheme is a critical element for secure development of smart grid. Recently, Mahmood et al. [1] proposed a lightweight message authentication scheme for smart grid communications and claimed that it satisfies the security requirements. Unfortunately, we found that Mahmood et al.'s scheme has some security vulnerabilities and it has not adequate security features to be utilized in smart grid. To address these drawbacks, we propose an efficient and secure lightweight privacy-preserving authentication scheme for a smart grid. Security of our scheme are evaluated, and the formal security analysis and verification are introduced via the broadly-accepted Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. Finally, the security and efficiency comparisons are provided, which indicate the security and efficiency of the proposed scheme as compared to other existing related schemes.
Siavash Ahmadi; Mohammad Reza Aref
Abstract
GOST block cipher designed in the 1970s and published in 1989 as the Soviet and Russian standard GOST 28147-89. In order to enhance the security of GOST block cipher after proposing various attacks on it, designers published a modified version of GOST, namely GOST2, in 2015 which has a new key schedule ...
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GOST block cipher designed in the 1970s and published in 1989 as the Soviet and Russian standard GOST 28147-89. In order to enhance the security of GOST block cipher after proposing various attacks on it, designers published a modified version of GOST, namely GOST2, in 2015 which has a new key schedule and explicit choice for S-boxes. In this paper, by using three exactly identical portions of GOST2 and fixed point idea, more enhanced fixed point attacks for filtration of wrong keys are presented. More precisely, the focus of the new attacks is on reducing memory complexity while keeping other complexities unchanged as well. The results show a significant reduction in the memory complexity of the attacks, while the time complexity slightly increased in comparison to the previous fixed point attacks. To the best of our knowledge, the lowest memory complexity for an attack on full-round GOST2 block cipher is provided here.
Mohammad Reza Aref
Volume 11, Issue 1 , January 2019, , Pages 1-2
Abstract
From the Editor-in-Chief
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From the Editor-in-Chief
Siavash Ahmadi; Zahra Ahmadian; Javad Mohajeri; Mohammad Reza Aref
Abstract
In the biclique attack, a shorter biclique usually results in less data complexity, but at the expense of more computational complexity. The early abort technique can be used in partial matching part of the biclique attack in order to slightly reduce the computations. In this paper, we make use of this ...
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In the biclique attack, a shorter biclique usually results in less data complexity, but at the expense of more computational complexity. The early abort technique can be used in partial matching part of the biclique attack in order to slightly reduce the computations. In this paper, we make use of this technique, but instead of slight improvement in the computational complexity, we keep the amount of this complexity the same and reduce the data complexity enormously by a shorter biclique. With this approach, we analysed full-round of LBlock, and also LBlock with modified key schedule (which was designed to resist biclique attack) both with data complexity 2^12, while the data complexity of the best biclique attack on the former was 2^52 and for the latter there is no attack on the full-round cipher, so far. Then we proposed a new key schedule that is more resistant against biclique cryptanalysis, though the low diffusion of the cipher makes it vulnerable to this attack regardless of the strength of the key schedule. Also using this method, we analyzed TWINE-80 with 2^12 data complexity. The lowest data complexity for the prior attack on the TWINE-80 was 2^60. In all the attacks presented in this paper, the computational complexities are slightly improved in comparison to the existing attacks.
M.R. Aref
Abstract
From the Editor-in-Chief
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From the Editor-in-Chief
M. Mahdavi Oliaee; M. Delavar; M.H. Ameri; J. Mohajeri; M.R. Aref
Abstract
In recent years, determining the common information privately and efficiently between two mutually mistrusting parties have become an important issue in social networks. Many Private Set Intersection (PSI) protocols have been introduced to address this issue. By applying these protocols, two parties ...
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In recent years, determining the common information privately and efficiently between two mutually mistrusting parties have become an important issue in social networks. Many Private Set Intersection (PSI) protocols have been introduced to address this issue. By applying these protocols, two parties can compute the intersection between their sets without disclosing any information about components that are not in the intersection. Due to the broad range of computational resources that the cloud can provide for its users, determining the set intersection by cloud may decrease the computational cost of the users. The proposed protocols by Abadi et al. are two protocols in this context. In this paper, we show that their protocols are vulnerable to eavesdropping attack. Also, a solution is proposed to secure the protocol against mentioned attack. Moreover, we analyze the performance of both O-PSI and modified O-PSI protocols and show that our scheme is comparable with the O-PSI protocol. Actually, one trivial solution for the Abadi et al.’s proposed schemes is to use a secure channel like TLS. However, in the performance evaluation, we compare our applied modification with this trivial solution, and show that our proposed modification is more efficient as some extra encryptions imposed by TLS are no longer required.
A. Rezaei Shahmirzdi; A. Azimi; M. Salmasizadeh; J. Mohajeri; M. R. Aref
Abstract
Impossible differential attack is a well-known mean to examine robustness of block ciphers. Using impossible differential cryptanalysis, we analyze security of a family of lightweight block ciphers, named Midori, that are designed considering low energy consumption. Midori state size can be ...
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Impossible differential attack is a well-known mean to examine robustness of block ciphers. Using impossible differential cryptanalysis, we analyze security of a family of lightweight block ciphers, named Midori, that are designed considering low energy consumption. Midori state size can be either 64 bits for Midori64 or 128 bits for Midori128; however, both versions have key size equal to 128 bits. In this paper, we mainly study security of Midori64. To this end, we use various techniques such as early-abort, memory reallocation, miss-in-the-middle and turning to account the inadequate key schedule algorithm of Midori64. We first show two new 7round impossible differential characteristics which are, to the best of our knowledge, the longest impossible differential characteristics found for Midori64. Based on the new characteristics, we mount three impossible differential attacks for 10, 11, and 12 rounds on Midori64 with 2 87.7 , 2 90.63 , and 2 90.51 time complexity, respectively, to retrieve the master-key.
M. R. Aref
Abstract
From the Editor-in-Chief
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From the Editor-in-Chief
N. Zarmehi; M. R. Aref
Abstract
This paper investigates the multiplicative spread spectrum watermarking method for the image. The information bit is spreaded into middle-frequency Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of each block of an image using a generated pseudo-random sequence. Unlike the conventional signal modeling, ...
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This paper investigates the multiplicative spread spectrum watermarking method for the image. The information bit is spreaded into middle-frequency Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of each block of an image using a generated pseudo-random sequence. Unlike the conventional signal modeling, we suppose that both signal and noise are distributed with Laplacian distribution, because the sample loss of digital media can be better modeled with this distribution than the Gaussian one. We derive the optimum decoder for the proposed embedding method thanks to the maximum likelihood decoding scheme. We also analyze our watermarking system in the presence of noise and provide analytical evaluations and several simulations. The results show that it has the suitable performance and transparency required for watermarking applications.
M. R. Aref
Abstract
From the Editor-in-Chief
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From the Editor-in-Chief
H. R. Amini Khorasgani; S. Asaad; H. Pilaram; T. Eghlidos; M. R. Aref
Abstract
In this paper, we introduce a method of threshold secret sharing scheme (TSSS) in which secret reconstruction is based on Babai's nearest plane algorithm. In order to supply secure public channels for transmitting shares to parties, we need to ensure that there are no quantum threats to these channels. ...
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In this paper, we introduce a method of threshold secret sharing scheme (TSSS) in which secret reconstruction is based on Babai's nearest plane algorithm. In order to supply secure public channels for transmitting shares to parties, we need to ensure that there are no quantum threats to these channels. A solution to this problem can be utilization of lattice-based cryptosystems for these channels which requires designing lattice-based TSSSs. We investigate the effect of lattice dimension on the security and correctness of the proposed scheme. Moreover, we prove that for a fixed lattice dimension the proposed scheme is asymptotically correct. We also give a quantitative proof of security from information theoretic viewpoint.
J. Alizadeh; M. R. Aref; N. Bagheri; H. Sadeghi
Abstract
ΑΕS _ CMCCv₁, ΑVΑLΑNCHEv₁, CLΟCv₁, and SILCv₁ are four candidates of the first round of CAESAR. CLΟCv₁ is presented in FSE 2014 and SILCv₁ is designed upon it with the aim of optimizing the hardware implementation cost. In this paper, structural ...
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ΑΕS _ CMCCv₁, ΑVΑLΑNCHEv₁, CLΟCv₁, and SILCv₁ are four candidates of the first round of CAESAR. CLΟCv₁ is presented in FSE 2014 and SILCv₁ is designed upon it with the aim of optimizing the hardware implementation cost. In this paper, structural weaknesses of these candidates are studied. We present distinguishing attacks against ΑES _ CMCCv₁ with the complexity of two queries and the success probability of almost 1, and distinguishing attacks on CLΟCv₁ and SILCv₁ with the complexity of Ο (2n/2) queries and the success probability of 0.63, in which n is bit length of message blocks. In addition, a forgery attack is presented against ΑVΑLΑNCHEv₁ which requires only one query and has the success probability of 1. The attacks reveal weaknesses in the structure of these first round candidates and inaccuracy of their security claims.
K. Baghery; B. Abdolmaleki; B. Akhbari; M. R. Aref
Abstract
Nowadays Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems have appeared in lots of identification and authentication applications. In some sensitive applications, providing secure and confidential communication is very important for end-users. To this aim, different RFID authentication protocols have been ...
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Nowadays Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems have appeared in lots of identification and authentication applications. In some sensitive applications, providing secure and confidential communication is very important for end-users. To this aim, different RFID authentication protocols have been proposed, which have tried to provide security and privacy of RFID users. In this paper, we analyze the privacy of two recently proposed RFID authentication protocols in 2012 and 2013. We present several traceability attacks including traceability, backward traceability and forward traceability against the first protocol. We also show that, the second protocol not only suffers from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, but also it is vulnerable to traceability and backward traceability attacks. We present our privacy analysis based on a well-known formal RFID privacy model which has been proposed by Ouafi and Phan in 2008. Then, in order to overcome the weaknesses, we apply some modifications on these protocols and propose two modified versions.
J. Alizadeh; M. R. Aref; N. Bagheri
Abstract
Authenticated encryption schemes establish both privacy and authenticity. This paper specifies a family of the dedicated authenticated encryption schemes, Artemia. It is an online nonce-based authenticated encryption scheme which supports the associated data. Artemia uses the permutation based mode, ...
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Authenticated encryption schemes establish both privacy and authenticity. This paper specifies a family of the dedicated authenticated encryption schemes, Artemia. It is an online nonce-based authenticated encryption scheme which supports the associated data. Artemia uses the permutation based mode, JHAE, that is provably secure in the ideal permutation model. The scheme does not require the inverse of the permutation in the decryption function, which causes the resource efficiency. Artemia permutations have an efficient and a simple structure and are provably secure against the differential and linear cryptanalysis. In the permutations, MDS recursive layers are used that can be easily implemented in both software and hardware.
Sh. Rasoolzadeh; Z. Ahmadian; M. Salmasizadeh; M. R. Aref
Abstract
An AES-like lightweight block cipher, namely Zorro, was proposed in CHES 2013. While it has a 16-byte state, it uses only 4 S-Boxes per round. This weak nonlinearity was widely criticized, insofar as it has been directly exploited in all the attacks on Zorro reported by now, including the weak key, reduced ...
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An AES-like lightweight block cipher, namely Zorro, was proposed in CHES 2013. While it has a 16-byte state, it uses only 4 S-Boxes per round. This weak nonlinearity was widely criticized, insofar as it has been directly exploited in all the attacks on Zorro reported by now, including the weak key, reduced round, and even full round attacks. In this paper, using some properties discovered by Wang et al. we present new differential and linear attacks on Zorro, both of which recover the full secret key with practical complexities. These attacks are based on very efficient distinguishers that have only two active S-Boxes per four rounds. The time complexities of our differential and linear attacks are 255.40 and 245.44 and the data complexity are 255.15 chosen plaintexts and 245.44 known plaintexts, respectively. The results clearly show that the block cipher Zorro does not have enough security against differential and linear attacks.
H. Ghasemzadeh; A. Payandeh; M. R. Aref
Abstract
Due to wireless nature and hostile environment, providing of security is a critical and vital task in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is known that key management is an integral part of a secure network. Unfortunately, in most of the previous methods, security is compromised in favor of reducing ...
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Due to wireless nature and hostile environment, providing of security is a critical and vital task in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is known that key management is an integral part of a secure network. Unfortunately, in most of the previous methods, security is compromised in favor of reducing energy consumption. Consequently, they lack perfect resilience and are not fit for applications with high security demands. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to improve the security of key management system based on broadcast messages from the base station. Another problem with WSNs is the cryptographic materials (such as private keys) stored in dead nodes. Adversaries may exploit these nodes to mount more effective attacks. Any secure key management system should also address this problem. It is argued that in the proposed method keying materials of dead nodes lose their validity, and therefore are of no use for an adversary. Finally, it is shown through simulation that the proposed method is almost three times more energy-efficient than conventional certificate-based key management systems.
F. Farhat; A. Diyanat; Sh. Ghaemmaghami; M. R. Aref
Abstract
So far, various components of image characteristics have been used for steganalysis, including the histogram characteristic function, adjacent colors distribution, and sample pair analysis. However, some certain steganography methods have been proposed that can thwart some analysis approaches through ...
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So far, various components of image characteristics have been used for steganalysis, including the histogram characteristic function, adjacent colors distribution, and sample pair analysis. However, some certain steganography methods have been proposed that can thwart some analysis approaches through managing the embedding patterns. In this regard, the present paper is intended to introduce a new analytical method for detecting stego images, which is robust against some of the embedding patterns designed specifically to foil steganalysis attempts. The proposed approach is based on the analysis of the eigenvalues of the cover correlation matrix used for the purpose of the study. Image cloud partitioning, vertical correlation function computation, constellation of the correlated data, and eigenvalues examination are the major challenging stages of this analysis method. The proposed method uses the LSB plane of images in spatial domain, extendable to transform domain, to detect low embedding rates-a major concern in the area of the LSB steganography. The simulation results based on deviation detection and rate estimation methods indicated that the proposed approach outperforms some well-known LSB steganalysis methods, specifically at low embedding rates.