Steganographic access control in data hiding using run‐length encoding and modulo‐operations

Abstract

AbstractThe vast potential of information and communication technologies such as computer‐based communication networks and telecommunication systems is indeed blooming innovations. This paper is a novel attempt in the field of authorization and access control, which uses steganography that coverts the data into a form that cannot be interpreted by unauthorized persons. The proposed algorithm transfers compressed data and hides it into a cover medium by improvising existing run‐length technique in steganography. It deals with a compression technique that uses the redundancy feature of a bitstream and then uses this compressed stream to embed data in an image. The run‐length encoding technique is exploited to compress a bitstream being embedded in a cover image. However, run‐length encoding method has inefficient compression like the sharp bitstreams, such as the pattern “101010101”. This study developed a novel high‐capacity steganographic access control in data hiding to transform sharp bitstreams into smooth bitstreams before it is hidden into a cover image. Our scheme performs the logical Exclusive‐OR (XOR) operation to smoothen the secret bitstream and to embed the result into a cover medium. Additionally, the proposed scheme employs generalized difference expansion transform for image recovery after data extraction; consequently, the image fidelity can be preserved. The experimental results show that our scheme owns a higher embedding capacity than previous approaches while maintaining high image quality. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.