Steganography in color images with random order of pixel selection and encrypted text message embedding

Abstract

Information security is major concern in modern digital ages, and the outdated algorithms need to be replaced with new ones or to be improved. In this article a new approach for hiding secret text message in color images is presented, combining steganography and cryptography. The location and the order of the image pixels chosen for information embedding are randomly selected using chaotic pseudo-random generator. Encrypting the secret message before embedding is another level of security designed to misguide the attackers in case of analyzing for traces of steganography. Evaluating the proposed stegoalgorithm. The standard statistical and empirical tests are used for randomness tests, key-space analysis, key-sensitivity analysis, visual analysis, histogram analysis, peak signal-to-noise ratio analysis, chi-square analysis, etc. The obtained results are presented and explained in the present article.