Security approach for LSB steganography based FPGA implementation

Abstract

Secrecy in communication is critical for people that have sensitive information. Steganography is a field that secures sensitive information by hiding it inside media files (such as images). What makes the concept of steganography powerful is that the secret message is hidden cleverly within the media file and thus carried around invisibly. Our paper proposed an automated method to secure a message using two levels of security. In the first level, the data is encrypted by our encryption method developed in Java and named Character Bit Shuffler (CBS). Then in the second level, the encrypted data is hidden inside an image using the Least Significant Bit (LSB) technique that changes only the last bits of the image pixels. The advantage of the LSB method is that it is simple as well as it maintains the quality of the image. A 1-1-0 LSB scheme will be used on 32-bit images in this paper. Experimental results that measure the image quality of our proposed approach are presented at the end of the paper.