Novel image steganography with improved security

Abstract

With continues advancement in technology, internet has proved to be a major way of communication between peoples. People are using this medium for communication, sharing important data, resources, technology, research and military related communications. However, the security of data we are sending is a major concern for most of us. In this cyber space, the transmitted information can be very simply modified or copied by unintended users. So, secrecy and privacy has become a hot topic nowadays. Therefore, finding more secure techniques to transmit our data has become a key issue nowadays. The goal of this research is to develop an algorithm that is more secure. In this paper, we present a secure steganographic technique. The secret image is divided into two parts using a pixel selection algorithm. Both parts contain almost equal number of pixels. These parts are embedded into two cover images using LSB Technique. A sequence key is assigned to both parts. At receiver end, secret image parts are aligned using sequence key. With this technique, it will be more difficult for attackers to crack secret Image from stego images. Experimental results show that original image is identical to stego image. This is proved by the fact that we have comparable visual quality as the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio values lie above 40db. We have also performed statistical security analysis, which shows that proposed technique is resistive to such type of attacks. Statistical properties of host image are same steganographic image due to this fact attackers cannot use statistical attacks.