Crypto-Steganographic LSB-based System for AES-Encrypted Data

Mwaffaq Abu-Alhaija

doi:10.14569/ijacsa.2019.0101009

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to increase the level of concealment of information from unauthorized access by pre-encrypting and hiding it in multimedia files such as images. A crypto-steganographic information protection algorithm with LSB-method was implemented. The algorithm hides AES pre-encrypted confidential information in the form of text or images into target containing image files. This method uses the concept of data concealing in the least significant pixel bits of the target image files. The proposed method relies on the use of Diffie-Hellman public key exchange protocol for securely exchanging the stego-key used for LSB as well as the public key used for encrypting the secret information. The algorithm ensures that the visual quality of the image remains unchanged, with no distortions perceived by the human eye. The algorithm also complicates the detection of concealed information embedded in the target image with use of PRNG as an enhancement for LSB. The proposed system scheme achieved competitive results. On an average, the system achieved a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 96.3 dB and a Mean Square Error (MSE) of 0.00408. The results obtained demonstrate that the proposed system offers high payload capabilities with immunity against visual degradation of resultant stego images.

Highlights

Due to modern technology, information plays a big role in a massive number of different fields
In this paper we propose an advanced cryptographic-steganography system that combines the features of cryptography and steganography
Mean Square Error (MSE) is the measurement of the square of error, the error is the amount by which the original image's pixel value is different to the encrypted image's pixel value

Summary

Introduction

Information plays a big role in a massive number of different fields. While cryptography uses encryption to make the message incomprehensible, steganography conceals the traces of the information ever existing. The steganography can be employed on any medium such as text, audio, video and image while cryptography is implemented only on the text file making steganography superior to cryptography [1]. Any information, such as text, messages, images, multimedia files, etc., can be used as a data carrier. Any form of data that can be represented in a bitstream can be hidden through steganography [3, 4]

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