Utilization of Corner Filters, AES and LSB Steganography for Secure Message Transmission

Abstract

This paper proposes a couple of multiple-layer message security schemes. The utilization of cryptography as well as steganography allows the attainment of an acceptable standard of information security. In both schemes, the plaintext data is first encrypted using the AES algorithm. Next, a spatial domain steganography technique is employed to conceal the encrypted sensitive data into 3D cover images. These procedures allow us to optimize for capacity. However, if a higher level of security is required, then an extra step of image processing takes place. More specifically, a corner filter is utilized on each of the 2D slides of the 3D cover images, such that LSB embedding only takes place in those corner-detected pixels. Numerical results exhibit superior performance, especially in comparison to counterpart steganography schemes found in the literature.