A modified LSB image steganography method using filtering algorithm and stream of password

Abstract

ABSTRACT Data is one of the most significant assets nowadays and needs to address correctly in the growing risk of cybersecurity. Additionally, every year, data is stolen and modified from the internet when transmitting. Therefore, to improve security while transmission, there are two techniques available called cryptography and steganography. In cryptography, the information is encrypted to ciphertexts using a private key, but the message’s existence is visible to others, no matter how unbreakable they are. On the other hand, steganography hides the secret data in an ordinary non-secret file to avoid visual detection. This paper proposed a new data hiding method using LSB image steganography, where confidential information uses only the selected image pixel. For that, image pixel information is used to filter the complete image to decide the candidate pixel, and a user-defined password is used to secure the LSB steganography. For better security, before applying steganography, the AES method encrypts the secret message. In the experiment, MSE and PSNR value are measured to assess the quality of the resultant stego image. The stego image provides higher PSNR and less MSE value as compared to other studied methods, which illustrate the flexibility of the proposed method.