Steganography -- A Game of Hide and Seek in Information Communication

📝 Abstract

With the growth of communication over computer networks, how to maintain the confidentiality and security of transmitted information have become some of the important issues. In order to transfer data securely to the destination without unwanted disclosure or damage, nature inspired hide and seek tricks such as, cryptography and Steganography are heavily in use. Just like the Chameleon and many other bio-species those change their body color and hide themselves in the background in order to protect them from external attacks, Cryptography and Steganography are techniques those are used to encrypt and hide the secret data inside other media to ensure data security. This paper discusses the concept of a simple spatial domain LSB Steganography that encrypts the secrets using Fibonacci- Lucas transformation, before hiding, for better security.

💡 Analysis

With the growth of communication over computer networks, how to maintain the confidentiality and security of transmitted information have become some of the important issues. In order to transfer data securely to the destination without unwanted disclosure or damage, nature inspired hide and seek tricks such as, cryptography and Steganography are heavily in use. Just like the Chameleon and many other bio-species those change their body color and hide themselves in the background in order to protect them from external attacks, Cryptography and Steganography are techniques those are used to encrypt and hide the secret data inside other media to ensure data security. This paper discusses the concept of a simple spatial domain LSB Steganography that encrypts the secrets using Fibonacci- Lucas transformation, before hiding, for better security.

📄 Content

Steganography- A Game of Hide and Seek in Information Communication Sanjeeb Kumar Behera1, Minati Mishra2
1,2Department of Information and Communication Technology Fakir Mohan University, Balasore, Odisha Email: sanjeeb4ever@gmail.com1, minatiminu@yahoo.com2

Abstract: With the growth of communication over computer networks, how to maintain the confidentiality and security of transmitted information have become some of the important issues. In order to transfer data securely to the destination without unwanted disclosure or damage, nature inspired hide and seek tricks such as, cryptography and Steganography are heavily in use. Just like the Chameleon and many other bio- species those change their body color and hide themselves in the background in order to protect them from external attacks, Cryptography and Steganography are techniques those are used to encrypt and hide the secret data inside other media to ensure data security. This paper discusses the concept of a simple spatial domain LSB Steganography that encrypts the secrets using Fibonacci- Lucas transformation, before hiding, for better security.
Keywords: Cover image, Steganography, LSB, Encryption, Decryption. I. Introduction Data is the backbone of any communication. With the drastic decline in the cost of the computing infrastructures required to copy, print, process and transmit information, modern communication systems make the distribution of documents instant and economic. This has given rise to issues such as illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted materials. As a result, people have started thinking of how to prevent such illicit activities and protect their works. The answer to this search has given birth to the magic concept of Steganography- the technique of message hiding. Nowadays, these techniques have become popular in a number of application areas including few negative areas [1].
The concept of data hiding has come up firstly to protect a piece of information so that data is secured and does not go to unintended destination, secondly, to protect the confidentiality and integrity of data against unauthorized access [2]. Data hiding techniques are broadly classified into four categories such as, Covert channels, Steganography, Anonymity and Copyright marking [3]. Cryptography is another information securing technique where the message is transformed so as to make its meaning obscure to malicious people who try to intercept it [4].
A. Steganography
Steganography is one of the important and widely used data hiding technique that is used for invisible communication of messages. This is done by hiding information in other information. The term Steganography has been derived from the Greek words “stegein” means “to cover” and “grafein” means “to write”.

Hence, Steganography can be considered to be a procedure of covered writing [5]. Since last few decades, this approach of information hiding has become popular in a number of application areas.
B. Types of Steganography There exist both spatial as well as transform domain image Steganography methods. The transform domain methods are generally used for authentication purposes and the spatial domain methods for Steganography. Depending upon the media used for cover, Steganography can further be classified into text, audio, image or video Steganography. Steganographic methods generally use the redundant bits of the cover medium for information hiding hence text is not very often used as cover since text files provide a small amount of redundancy. Audio/video though provide a lot of redundancy but are very complex to use therefore, image Steganography is widely used. Today, images the most popular cover media used for Steganography where an altered image with some amount of intensity variation remains indistinguishable from the original image to human vision. In this work images are used as covers to hide the secret information. LSB substitution is a popular spatial domain method that replaces the lower order image bits, those do not carry much useful image information, by the secret message bits [6]. Two other technologies closely related to Steganography are watermarking and fingerprinting. These technologies are mainly concerned with authentication and protection of intellectual property [7].
C. Steganography: A game of hide and seek
If we compare Steganography to the camouflaging behaviors of living species, then we can see that there are some species those naturally protect their lives from external attacks by using several deception tricks. Chameleons, some butterflies and few other bio-species change their body colors depending upon the surrounding and blend them into the surrounding so that the external attackers will not be able know about their presence. Steganographic techniques adopt these tricks from the nature and demand

This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.