Secure 2D Image Steganography Using Recamán's Sequence

Abstract

This paper presents a double -layer secure message scheme. The first layer is of a cryptographic nature, where the Data Encryption Standard (DES), CAST5 or Blowfish is firstly applied on the message bits for a higher security level. However, the second layer is of steganographic nature, where the encrypted data is hidden in the Least Significant Bits (LSB)s of a 2D cover image using Recamán's Sequence which determines the order of bytes to embed in. The performance of the proposed scheme is measured in terms of the maximum embedding capacity, the mean square error (MSE), the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and the structural similarity index metric (SSIM), as well as histogram analyses, entropy measures and running time complexity.