Crypto-Stego-Real-Time (CSRT) System for Secure Reversible Data Hiding

Abstract

Due to demand of information transfer through higher speed wireless communication network, it is time to think about security of important information to be transferred. Further, as these communication networks are part of open channel, to preserve the security of any Critical Information (CI) is really a challenging task in any real-time application. Data hiding techniques give more security and robustness of important CI against encryption or cryptographic software solutions. However, hardwired approach exhibits better solution not only in terms of reduction of complexity but also in terms of adaptive real-time output. This paper demonstrates frequency, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain Steganographic data hiding hardware solution for secret communication called Crypto-Stego-Real-Time (CSRT) System. The challenge is to design a secure algorithm keeping reliability of minimum distortion of original cover signal while embedding considerable amount of CI. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation shown in this paper is more secure, robust, and fast. Pipelining process while embedding enhances the speed of embedding, optimizes the memory utilization, and gives better Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and high robustness. Practically implemented hardware Steganographic solutions shown in this paper also give better performance than that of the current state-of-the-art hardware implementations.