Highly randomized image steganography using secret keys

Abstract

Steganography is an art and specially a science of hiding secret information inside a carrier like image, audio, video. This paper proposes a new approach of image steganography which uses two secret keys to randomize the bit hiding process. Use of two secret keys enhances the security of secret information. This approach uses red, green and blue values of a pixel and performs some calculation. Based on this calculation, secret information bits will be placed at the random position of the pixels. This approach maintains high data hiding capacity like LSB substitution but maintains a much better security level, which is not present in LSB substitution as LSB substitution technique is predictable. As the hidden information is highly randomized, so it is difficult for attacker to retrieve the secret information from stego image. I used PSNR value to determine the quality of stego image and also compare it with other efficient image steganography techniques. The obtained result showed that this algorithm is highly efficient as compared to many other techniques.