Steganographic Authentication in Cloud Storage for Mitigation of Security Risks

Abstract

Identity theft is a serious crime where the criminals steal user's identity to access their bank accounts, personal hospital records and etc. The usage of cloud storage has allowed the hackers to attack the victims easily by accessing the victim's data stored in a remote location. Cloud storage may be convenient to allow users to store any data files and access those files from different devices and in different locations around the world. However, it can still pose security threats as with a lot of important data stored in one location is very appealing to cunning hackers. The solution of using image steganography application to hide important data or documents under an image before uploading them to the cloud storage will avoid the risks of attracting hackers or outsiders to discover the importance of the data hidden. The application uses one of simplest image steganography approach 'LSB algorithm' to achieve best quality of encoded image/stego-image. Besides, the application can be deployed via offline or online depending whether they want to upload the encoded image/stego-image to the cloud storage.