Image and audio steganography based on indirect LSB
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48129/kjs.v48i4.8992Abstract
Hiding the presence of data during communication has become a pressing concern in this extremely digitalized world due to the unauthorized data access and network violations that are rapidly emerging. These concerns have led to cryptography and steganography techniques as methods for securing data. Steganography is the process of concealing confidential information in the codes that creates digital files. This paper presents a modified information-hiding technique based on indirect least significant bit hiding. Instead of saving each bit of the secret message in the Least Significant Bit (LSB) of the cover media, each bit of the secret message is compared to a specific bit in the cover media, and the result of the comparison is saved in the cover media’s LSB. In this paper, two steganography schemas are designed in which the cover media are image and audio, while the secret message is a text file. In image steganography, each channel (red, green and blue) is used to conceal the secret message; the location of the bit that is used to compare to the secret message is generated for each channel using the binary representation of the first cell for each channel. In audio steganography, the bit location for each audio sample is retrieved from the bit representation of the audio length. A simple encryption technique is used to transform the secret message into an unreadable format before the hiding process begins. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves promising performance in terms of the quality metrics PSNR, SNR and SSIM.
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