Secret Key Steganography: improve security level of LSB algorithm

Abstract

Internet has revolutionized the way people share information, store data, communicate, learn, and do business. Internet has been used for information transmission; this has changed in the last decade. Today, governments, businesses and individuals are increasingly relying on-line applications; the need to secure data exchange over the Internet and store it on the cloud has gained more importance. Data security aims to keep information safe by using cryptography and/or steganography. Steganography is a suitable candidate for keeping information safe, hiding the existence of data itself inside another medium. The Least Significant Bit (LSB) algorithm is one of the most common techniques to hide secret messages in an image. The main problem with LSB is knowing whether such an image has a secret message inside, making it easy to retrieve it by collecting the least significant bit from the steg-image. This paper presents an attempt to improve the security level of the LSB algorithm by using a secret steganography key. The proposed algorithm SKLSB is encoding the secret key from the cover image, encodes the secret message using the secret key, embedding it to the cover image. Even if attackers know about the steganography, they cannot know about the secret key. The SKLSB algorithm helps to get a higher and better level of security, useful for keeping sensitive, relevant, and important information stored. The results regarding this paper are compared with LSB algorithm regarding its Mean Square Error (MSE) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) values aiming to show this method is more secure and does not affect the image imperceptibility.