Simplified and Improved LSB2 (SILSB2) Method of Secret Message Steganography

Abstract

A simplified and improved method based on LSB2 (SILSB2) method of secret message steganography will be introduced. The method will simplify the message hiding and extracting functions by reducing the set of operations used to hide and extract the secret message. The proposed method will work on inserting and retrieving the secret message in one go instead of inserting or retrieving it byte by byte as used in the classical methods. The introduced method will add a security issues to LSB2 method by using a special private key. This key will be used to divide the secret message into blocks, and each block will be hidden/extracted alone. The private key will be used also to define the staring locations in the covering-stego images, where to start hiding or extracting the message block. The private key will provide a good key space to protect the message from being hacked, the extracted message will be very sensitive to the private key values, any changes in these values will lead to extract a corrupted damaged message, and these changes will be considered as a hacking attempt. The introduced method will be tested and implemented using various messages and various covering images, the obtained results will be analyzed to prove the quality, security, sensitivity and the efficiency provided by the proposed method.