Securing LSB steganography using bite substitution and image blocking

Abstract

Protecting secret messages is a vital issue, in this paper’s research, a simplified, highly secure method of message steganography will be introduced. The proposed method will use a complicated PK, which contains information to select a secret block from the color image to be used as a covering block; also it will contain the values of the chaotic logistic map model to run this model to generate the indices key needed to substitute the message binary matrix. The PK will provide a huge keyspace capable to resist hacking attacks, the extracted message will be very sensitive to any minor changes in the PK, and any changes in this key during the extraction phase will be considered a hacking attempt by producing a damaged extracted message. It will be shown that the proposed method will be always efficient when changing the message length and changing the covering images. The proposed method will be implemented using various messages and various covering images, the obtained results will be analyzed using various types of data analysis methods to prove the improvements provided by the proposed method (quality, security, and efficiency).