A Two-Layer Image-Steganography System for Covert Communication Over Enterprise Network

Abstract

Computers find application in virtually all aspect of human existence, especially in today’s modern world. Although this comes with a lot of benefits, it also comes with a number of undesirable consequences. Chief among these consequences is the rising concerns for security of information and even loss of privacy. Steganography, an Information hiding technique could be a fitting solution to these security issues. This paper presents an improved Steganography technique for ensuring the security of the widely spread and used internet materials or information that are shared globally with risk of vulnerability of attack. In this current research work, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) Steganography were combined together to achieve effective security in the proposed system. A given plain text or secret message is first converted to a cipher text using ECC. The resultant encrypted text is then hidden under a cover-image using DCT-based image steganography technique to produce a final output called stego-image. To the Human Visual System (HVS), the stego-image remains the same as the original cover image. This ensures that the hidden secret message gets delivered to the target recipient without any suspicion. Standard metrics such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Square Error (MSE), as well as average computation time, were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed steganography system. The results indicate better performance compared to the conventional steganography systems. Thus the proposed system is a 2-level steganography system effective for storing sensitive data and even for securely transferring information over an open/enterprise network.