A Survey of Image Steganography (original) (raw)

An Overview of Image Steganography using LSB Technique

International Journal

Steganography is the art of hiding the fact that communication is taking place, by hiding information in other information. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency on the Internet. For hiding secret information in images, there exists a large variety of steganographic techniques some are more complex than others and all of them have respective strong and weak points. This paper intends to give an overview of image steganography, its uses and techniques. For a more secure approach, this paper encrypts the message using secret key and then sends it to the receiver. The receiver then decrypts the message to get the original one. The rapid development of data transfer through internet made it easier to send the data accurate and faster to the destination. This paper deals with the algorithm based on hiding a large amount of data (image, audio, text) file into color BMP image. This project gives a brief idea about the image steganographic approach that make use of Least Significant Bit(LSB) algorithm for embedding the data into the bitmap image(.bmp) which is implemented through the JDK 1.5.0_07 environment. The Least Significant Bit (LSB) embedding technique suggests that data can be hidden in the least significant bits of the cover image and the human eye would be unable to notice the hidden image in the cover file.

An Effective Way of using LSB Steganography in images along with Cryptography

International Journal of Computer Applications, 2014

Hiding data is a very important thing nowadays as the data travels over various unsecure networks. To avoid this problem cryptography is used which hides the data or scrambles your message, but cryptography alone cannot provide total security as the message is still available to perform cryptanalysis. Steganography hides the existence of the message. Most of the peoples use either cryptography or steganography to improve security. But a combination of both the techniques provides better security. This paper will describe an effective way of using cryptography along with a modification in LSB steganography in images.

Image based steganography using cryptography

2021

Received April 19, 2021 Revised April 27, 2021 Accepted April 27, 2021 In the world of increasing usage of the internet, data security plays an important role in achieving confidentiality, authentication, and integrity for secure communication. Cryptography and Steganography is the method to achieve data security through which information is protected and only the intended person can read the information. In this paper, a technique is proposed where Steganography and Cryptography are used in a combined manner for securing the data. In which the LSB method is used for embedding and extracting the data from the image. A symmetric cryptographic algorithm used to encrypt the data is done by using Armstrong numbers before embedding the data into the image. A key is generated using Armstrong numbers and any specified string and the same key generated is used for encrypting and decrypting the data.

Encryption based LSB Steganography Technique for Digital Images and Text Data

Digital steganography is the art and science of hiding communications; a steganographic system thus embeds secret data in public cover media so as not to arouse an eavesdropper's suspicion. A steganographic system has two main aspects: steganographic capacity and imperceptibility. However, these two characteristics are at odds with each other. Furthermore, it is quite difficult to increase the steganographic capacity and simultaneously maintain the imperceptibility of a steganographic system. Additionally, there are still very limited methods of Steganography to be used with communication protocols, which represent unconventional but promising Steganography mediums. Digital image Steganography, as a method of secret communication, aims to convey a large amount of secret data, relatively to the size of cover image, between communicating parties. Additionally, it aims to avoid the suspicion of noncommunicating parties to this kind of communication. Thus, this research addresses and proposes some methods to improve these fundamental aspects of digital image Steganography. Hence, some characteristics and properties of digital images have been employed to increase the steganographic capacity and enhance the stego image quality (imperceptibility). Here, the research aim is identified based on the established definition of the research problem and motivations. Unlike encryption, Steganography hides the very existence of secret information rather than hiding its meaning only. Image based Steganography is the most common system used since digital images are widely used over the Internet and Web. However, the capacity is mostly limited and restricted by the size of cover images. In addition, there is a tradeoff between both steganographic capacity and stego image quality. Therefore, increasing steganographic capacity and enhancing stego image quality are still challenges, and this is exactly our research main aim. To get a high steganographic capacity, novel Steganography methods were proposed. The first method was based on using 8x8 nonoverlapping blocks and quantization table for DCT with compression. Second method incorporates the DWT technique, with quality of any stego images as enhanced to get correct hidden image. And last LSB as to store images with Key type security built in.

A Comprehensive Image Steganography Tool using LSB Scheme

International Journal of Image, Graphics and Signal Processing, 2015

As a consequence of the fact, transmitting data has been fast and easy these days due to the development of the Internet. Where internet is the most important medium for confidential and non-confidential communications. Security is the major matter for these communications and steganography is the art of hiding and transmitting secret messages through carriers without being exposed. This paper presents a secured model for communication using image steganography. The main concern is to create a Java-based tool called IMStego that hides information in images using Least Significant Bit (LSB) algorithm (1-LSB) and modified Least Significant one Bit algorithm, i.e. Least Significant 2 Bits algorithm (2-LSB). IMStego is a more comprehensive security utility where it provides user-friendly functionality with interactive graphical user interface and integrated navigation capabilities. It provides the user with two operations, which are hiding secret data into images and extracting hidden data from images using 1-LSB or 2-LSB algorithm. IMStego tool hides secrete information in color static images with formats BMP and PNG.

Research Article A Novel Approach to Enhance the Security of the LSB Image Steganography

2014

Abstract: Forming a logical balance between the quality of the file and the scope of data that can be conveyed is the test of steganographic techniques to form such a balance. On top of that, the facts that cannot be covered up are the robustness of the method and security of the vague data. An insertion method which delivers a high level of visual quality and a huge amount of volume for the obscured data is called the Least Significant Bit (LSB), but the concealed message is poorly secured through this technique. In the recommended approach, the Vigenere encryption techniques initially used to encode the secret data to assure the safety of the concealed message. Later, the data is contracted through the Huffman coding method in order to decrease the occupational volume of the classified data. Then, each bit stream of the data is dispersed out onto the image to enhance the robustness of the technique by using the expanded knight tour algorithm. The outcomes show that apart from enha...

A New Image Steganographic Approach for Secure Communication Based on LSB Replacement Method

Information Technology And Control, 2015

With the development of internet technologies and communication services, message transmissions over the internet still have to face all kinds of security problems. Hence, how to protect secret messages during transmission becomes a challenging issue for most of current researchers. It is worth mentioning that many applications in computer science and other related fields rely on steganography and watermarking techniques to ensure information safety during communication. Unlike cryptography that focuses on scrambling the secret message so that it cannot be understood, the main objective of steganography and watermarking is to communicate securely in such a way that the hidden data are not visible to the observer. In other words, it seeks for the imperceptibility of stego-images quality to an unintended party through embedding efficiently the secret message in a digital media such as image, video, or audio. In this paper, we propose a new steganographic method to embed the secret data inside a cover image based on least-significant-bit (LSB) replacement method. The embedding process predominantly concentrates on distributing the secret message inside one share of a color image to appear like a 3D geometric shape that is constructed according to well-analyzed geometric equations. The dimensions of the geometric shape are determined pursuant to the size of secret message. Data distribution process makes our method to be of a great interest as of being so difficult for the hackers or intruders to reconstruct the shape from stego-images, thereby the security is improved. Furthermore, we compare the performance of our approach with two other relevant approaches in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and payload. The contribution of our approach was immensely impressive.

LSB Based Image Steganography for Information Security System

International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development, 2018

Information hiding in a cover file is one of the most modernized and effective ways for transferring secret message from sender to receiver over the communication channel. There are many steganographic techniques for hiding secret message in image, text, audio, video and so on. Image Steganography is also one of the common methods used for hiding the information in the cover image. In this research work, the secret message is hidden in a cover image file using image steganography. LSB is very efficient algorithm used to embed the information in a cover file. The LSB based image steganography with various file sizes is analyzed and illustrated their results. Bitmap (*.bmp) image is used as a cover image file to implement the proposed system. The detail Least Significant Bit (LSB) based image steganography is introduced. In this paper, the new embedding algorithm and extracting algorithm are presented. While embedding the secret message in a cover image file, the starting embedded pixel is chosen according to public shared key between sender and receiver. The original cover image and embedded image with secret message are analyzed with PSNR values and SNR values to achieve security. The resulting embedded image shows the acceptable PSNR and SNR values while comparing with the original cover image. The proposed system can help the information exchanging system over communication media.

Improving the security of LSB image steganography

JOIV : International Journal on Informatics Visualization, 2019

Steganography is the technique of hiding secret data (message) within any media such as digital color image. In this paper we will merge steganography process with cryptography process in order to increase the security of the proposed method. The steganography process will based on LSB method, while the cryptography process will based on generating a huge private key and selecting a special function for encryption decryption. The proposed method will be implemented in order to calculate some performance parameters to prove the efficiency of the proposed method.

Evaluation of LSB Based Image Steganography Technique for various File Formats

2015

Steganography is derived from the Greek word steganos which literally means “Covered” and graphy means “Writing”, i.e. covered writing. Steganography is the art and science of hiding messages in such a way that no one apart from sender and receiver identify the message. The paper describes the steganalysis technique for the detection of secret message in the image. The strong and weak point of this technique is mentioned briefly. Steganography function is used to hide a secret message in any media such as text, image, audio and video. There are many algorithms used for hiding the information. One of the simplest and best known techniques is Least Significant Bit (LSB). This paper focuses on image Steganography and hiding the message in the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method. We also discuss the LSB method used for various file formats. KeywordsCryptography, Steganography, Steganalysis, LSB (Least Significant Bit), GIF, PNG, BMP.