Image steganography based on DNA sequence translation properties

Abstract

Digital communication has become a vital part of daily life nowadays, many applications are using internet-based communication and here the importance of security rose to have a secure communication between two parties to prevent authorized access to sensitive data. These requirements led to a number of research in information security that has been done in the past two decades. Cryptography and steganography are the two main methods that are being used for information security. Cryptography refers to techniques that encrypt a message to be sent to a destination using different methods to be done. On the other hand, steganography is the science of hiding information from others using another cover message or media such as image, audio, video, and DNA sequence. This paper proposed a new method to hide information in an image using the least significant bit (LSB) based on Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) sequence. To accomplish this, the proposed scheme used properties of DNA sequence when codons that consist of three nucleotides are translated to proteins. The LSB of two pixels from the image are taken to represent a codon and then translate them to protein. The secret message bits are injected into codons before the translation process which slightly distorts the image and makes the image less suspicious and hard to detect the hidden message. The experimental results indicate the effeteness of the proposed method.