Highly Secure Steganography-Based System with Three Layers of Protection

EasyChair Preprint 5544

Abstract

Communication and exchanging information via the internet are essential to perform daily tasks in this technological age. Recently, steganography has received great attention from researchers due to its valuable applications in practice. Steganography-based systems suffer from some challenges, and (1) guaranteeing perfect matching between the cover and the stego object and (2) ensuring high resistance against attacks are the most important ones. In this work, a steganography-based system is proposed. The system hides the secret data within the Least Significant Bit (LSB), which forms the first layer against attackers when it comes to discovering the communication between sender and receiver. The LSB is supported by an encryption layer so that if the attacker tries to obtain the secret data, a decryption process is required. The encryption layer is also supported by a randomization layer so that if the attacker has the ability of decryption, a reassembling process is required. Both the session key of the encryption algorithm and the seed of the randomization algorithm are exchanged safely using symmetric and asymmetric algorithms. In terms of PSNR, SSIM, payload capacity, and retrieved bit error rate, the proposed system shows better performance, especially against rotation and bilinear attacks.

Keyphrases: PSNR, SSIM, hidden secret data

@booklet{EasyChair:5544,
  author    = {Hajar Alhelow},
  title     = {Highly Secure Steganography-Based System with Three Layers of Protection},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 5544},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}