Secure Image Steganography Through Pre-processing

Abstract

The security of information is required by internet technologies and its application during transmission over the nonsecured communication channel. Steganography means is to hide secret data into another media file. In the spatial domain, Least Significant Bit (LSB) is used. LSB is the most common approach because of its easiness and hiding capacity. Preprocessing is required for better security but all current techniques of Image Steganography mainly concentrate on the hiding strategy and less concern about encryption of secret image. For digital Image Steganography security, a unique technique based on the Data Encryption Standard (DES) is introduced in this paper. Plaintext with a block size of 64 bit and 56 bits of the secret key is used by DES. Better security and a high level of secrecy are achieved by pre-processing as it is not possible to extract the image without knowledge of the S-Box mapping rules and a secret key of the function. The discussion shows that the Steganographic technique with pre-processing is better than LSB steganography algorithms directly.