Steganography within LSB and Second LSB with randomness depending on indicators using secret key

Other Title(s)

إخفاء المعلومات في LSB و ثاني LSB عشوائيا اعتمادا على المؤشرات باستخدام المفتاح السري

Dissertant

Saqr, Wisam Munir Salih

Thesis advisor

Barhum, Tawfiq Sulayman

University

Islamic University

Faculty

Faculty of Information Technology

Department

Information Technology

University Country

Palestine (Gaza Strip)

Degree

Master

Degree Date

2017

English Abstract

Steganography is the art of science that is concerned with hiding communications by hiding secret information inside a medium as a carrier, called cover medium, to be sent over communication channels to meant parties.

Information hiding could be done with simple and direct methods; however we should increase hidden information security as possible by developing and using more robust ways.

One of the most used techniques is Lest Significant Bit (LSB) Substitution.

The direct approach that uses LSB Substitution is Sequential LSB that embeds data sequentially, but it is too simple and easy to attack.

So, to increase hidden information security, we must use this technique of hiding in random way.

Many algorithms were set to increase the security of the hidden data, each of which has its own mechanism of data hiding randomization.

This research introduces a relatively new algorithm of data hiding, called Indicators-based LSB, which embeds data randomly to increase the hidden data security.

The algorithm implements randomness using indicators, which makes embedding operation moves forward and backward through cover mediums during hiding process.

Also, for increasing hidden information security, a secret key is used through hiding process.

A secret key is a sequence of characters defined by users.

There are several types of cover mediums as images, audios, videos, etc.

However, image based steganography is the most common system used, since digital images are widely used over the Internet, so images were used through our research as the cover mediums for experiments and image quality metrics as Peak signal-tonoise ratio (PSNR) and mean square error (MSE) were used for evaluation.

Also, stego images were subjected to steganalysis, which is the art of detecting steganography, to test the algorithm robustness.

According to the tests and results, the randomness of the algorithm is extremely satisfied, so it is hard to attack the resulting stego files.

Also the embedding operation of the algorithm results in stego files with high quality, so it doesn’t arouse any suspicion.

Main Subjects

Information Technology and Computer Science

No. of Pages

69

Table of Contents

• APA
• MLA
• AMA

Language

English

Data Type

Arab Theses

Record ID

BIM-905920