Steganography in Color Animated Image Sequence for Secret Data Sharing Using Secure Hash Algorithm

Abstract

Steganography is one of the leading strategy that is employed to hide restricted content into a cover media so that the person unaware of the fact can’t predict that the cover media can acquire some secret information. The effectiveness of any steganographic approach is appraised on imperceptibility of the stego-media, payload of the cover media, integrity of the secret information, security, and computational complexity. The work presented in this paper focuses on these important concerns of secured data transmission. The proposed steganographic approach uses multimedia files including animated image sequences as cover media for concealing secret messages. The entire secret information to be embedded is converted to a code using Secure Hash Algorithm-1 (SHA-1) (National Institute of Standards, and Technology (US). Technology Administration. Secure hash standard, 1993) and shared with the secret message to validate the authenticity of the transmitted secret information. The whole secret message is converted to its ASCII to embed them by replacing the least significant digit (LSD) (Liu et al. In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), IEEE, 2012). The receiver validates the transmitted information with SHA-1 again generating a code, which validates with the existing code sent over from the transmitting end. The proposed algorithm is worked upon a variety of text messages with a large set of color animated image sequences as cover media and also has been tested carefully by different parametric measures. This algorithm gives robust outputs in terms of visual imperceptibility, safety, and embedding capability.