Pixel value differencing steganography techniques: Analysis and open challenge

Steganography is the science of secret data communication using carrier medium, such as images, videos, text, and networks. Image steganography is majorly divided into spatial and frequency domains. Pixel value differencing (PVD) considered as good steganographic algorithm due to its high payload and good visual perception in spatial domain. The purpose of this paper is two folded. First is the critical analysis of current PVD methods using evaluating parameters (payload, visual quality and resistance of attacks) and secondly it highlights the current promising directions on PVD steganographic research

A review and open issues of multifarious image steganography techniques in spatial domain

Nowadays, information hiding is becoming a helpful technique and fetch more attention due fast growth of using internet, it is applied for sending secret information by using different techniques. Steganography is one of major important technique in information hiding. Steganography is science of concealing the secure information within a carrier object to provide the secure communication though the internet, so that no one can recognize and detect it’s except the sender & receiver. In steganography, many various carrier formats can be used such as an image, video, protocol, audio. The digital image is most popular used as a carrier file due its frequency on internet. There are many techniques variable for image steganography, each has own strong and weak points. In this study, we conducted a review of image steganography in spatial domain to explore the term image steganography by reviewing, collecting, synthesizing and analyze the challenges of different studies which related to this area published from 2014 to 2017. The aims of this review is provides an overview of image steganography and comparison between approved studies are discussed according to the pixel selection, payload capacity and embedding algorithm to open important research issues in the future works and obtain a robust method

Performance evaluation measurement of image steganography techniques with analysis of LSB based on variation image formats

Recently, Steganography is an outstanding research area which used for data protection from unauthorized access. Steganography is defined as the art and science of covert information in plain sight in various media sources such as text, images, audio, video, network channel etc. so, as to not stimulate any suspicion; while steganalysis is the science of attacking the steganographic system to reveal the secret message. This research clarifies the diverse showing the evaluation factors based on image steganographic algorithms. The effectiveness of a steganographic is rated to three main parameters, payload capacity, image quality measure and security measure. This study is focused on image steganographic which is most popular in in steganographic branches. Generally, the Least significant bit is major efficient approach utilized to embed the secret message. In addition, this paper has more detail knowledge based on Least significant bit LSB within various Images formats. All metrics are illustrated in this study with arithmetical equations while some important trends are discussed also at the end of the paper

A Review of Image Steganography Techniques

اخفاء الصور هو أحد تقنيات تأمين البيانات كصورة غلاف. من ناحية أخرى ، نظرًا لأن الاتصالات السرية وتطوير محتويات الوسائط المتعددة ، يعكس الاختزال للتقنيات أدوارًا مهمة. تعد جودة صورة الغلاف  "stego "وقدرة صورة الغلاف جانبًا مهمًا في نظامstegnography ، ويعتمد تقييم الأداء ومقارنة التقنيات على هذه المعلمات في نظام إخفاء المعلومات. هناك تقنيات تضمين موجودة تهدف إلى حماية المعلومات ، ومعدل تضمين البت الأعلى يمثل تحديًا مهمًا في تصميم نظام إخفاء المعلومات. تسلط هذه الورقة الضوء على مراجعة الأدبيات لنهج المجال المكاني للتصنيف (الاعتماد على قيمة البكسل) لإخفاء الصور ؛ و شمل ، (1) إخفاء العلومات باستخدام طريقة  LSB ، (2) إخفاء المعلومات باستخدام طريقة PVD ، (3) إخفاء المعلومات باستخدام طريقة GLM ، (4) إخفاء المعلومات باستخدام طريقة PPM الهدف من هذه الورقة هو توفير ملخص شامل للأعمال الموجودة من حيث الهدف ، وتسليط الضوء على نقاط القوة والضعف في التقنيات الحالية.Image steganography is one in  techniques of securing data as a cover image. In the other hand, since secret communications and development of multimedia contents, stenography of the techniques  reflect important roles. In based are reflected stegnography system, the quality of stego image and the capacity of the cover image are important side of the image, evaluate performance and comparison of  techniques are depending on these parameters in steganography system. There are existing embedding techniques that aim to protect information, and a higher bit embedding rate is an important challenge in designing a steganographic system.  This paper highlights a literature review of the classification spatial domain (beads on pixel value) approach  of image steganography; include, (i) LSB steganography, (ii) PVD based steganography, (iii)GLM based steganography, (iv) PPM based steganography. The goal of this paper is to supply a comprehensive summary of  existing works in terms of ideals, and to highlight the strong and weak points of current  techniques

Dual-image-based reversible data hiding scheme with integrity verification using exploiting modification direction

Abstract(#br)In this paper, a novel dual-image-based reversible data hiding scheme using exploiting modification direction (EMD) is proposed. This scheme embeds two 5-base secret digits into each pixel pair of the cover image simultaneously according to the EMD matrix to generate two stego-pixel pairs. By shifting these stego-pixel pairs to the appropriate locations in some cases, two meaningful shadows are produced. The secret data can be extracted accurately, and the cover image can be reconstructed completely in the data extraction and the image reconstruction procedure, respectively. Experimental results show that our scheme outperforms the comparative methods in terms of image quality and embedding ratio. Pixel-value differencing (PVD) histogram analysis reveals that our scheme..

Solving the threat of LSB steganography within data loss prevention systems

With the recent spate of data loss breaches from industry and commerce, especially with the large number of Advanced Persistent Threats, companies are increasing their network boundary security. As network defences are enhanced through the use of Data Loss Prevention systems (DLP), attackers seek new ways of exploiting and extracting confidential data. This is often done by internal parties in large-scale organisations through the use of steganography. The successful utilisation of steganography makes the exportation of confidential data hard to detect, equipped with the ability of escaping even the most sophisticated DLP systems. This thesis provides two effective solutions to prevent data loss from effective LSB image steganographic behaviour, with the potential to be applied in industrial DLP systems

Solving the threat of LSB steganography within data loss prevention systems

With the recent spate of data loss breaches from industry and commerce, especially with the large number of Advanced Persistent Threats, companies are increasing their network boundary security. As network defences are enhanced through the use of Data Loss Prevention systems (DLP), attackers seek new ways of exploiting and extracting confidential data. This is often done by internal parties in large-scale organisations through the use of steganography. The successful utilisation of steganography makes the exportation of confidential data hard to detect, equipped with the ability of escaping even the most sophisticated DLP systems. This thesis provides two effective solutions to prevent data loss from effective LSB image steganographic behaviour, with the potential to be applied in industrial DLP systems

Enhancing The Performance Of Digital Image Data Hiding Using Reduced Difference Expansion Technique And Constant Base Point

The last few decades have been marked by a rapid growth and significant enhancement of the internet infrastructures, i.e., the internet has become a broad network enabling many enterprises around the world to interact while sharing multimedia data. Nevertheless, this technology has brought many challenges related to securing private and sensitive information which has led to the application of cryptography technique as a mean for securing data by encrypting them. However, since the encrypted data can be seen by active and sophisticated intruders during the transmission, this may lead to its suspicion which can result in unauthorized access. Thereby, data hiding (which is also called information hiding) is another technique for securing commutation via the public network. Data hiding is one of the best and most challenging fields dealing with securing organizational sensitive information due to many factors such as identity theft, information phishing, user privacy, network policy violation, contents and copyright protection. It is performed by utilizing some carriers to conceal private information which is further extracted later to verify and validate the genuineness. Digital steganography has been recognized among the recent and most popular data hiding techniques. Steganography is the practice of concealing confidential information in the codes that make up the digital files. Such digital files can be an image, audio, video, and text. Different from cryptography, however, steganography provides security by disguising the presence of communication. It originates from the concept that if the communication is visible, the suspicion or attack is obvious. Hence, the main goal is to always disguise the presence of the hidden confidential data. Recently, various data iv hiding methods based on digital image steganography have been already suggested by several researchers around the globe. The main goal was to improve the security, embedding capacity and the quality of the stego image. However, research have shown that there is still a challenge to achieve a good visual quality of the stego media while preserving a good embedding capacity. In this direction, this study aims at proposing a new data hiding approach that enhances the quality of the stego image and the embedding capacity. That is, the suggested approach enhances the existing data hiding methods by utilizing pixel block, constant base point for each pixel block and the reduced difference expansion scheme (RDE-scheme) for grayscale digital images. Accordingly, the suggested enhancement is detailed as follows. First, the existing reduced difference expansion scheme (RDE-scheme) for reducing the difference values is enhanced in order to get possible small values to be used while concealing the secret data into the cover image. The main objective behind this enhancement is to allow data to be concealed while preserving the quality of the stego image. Notice that the suggested RDE-scheme does not only enhance the quality but also it solves the problem of underflow and overflow. The underflow is encountered when the pixel value in the stego image is below 0 (Pixel value < 0) while the overflow occurs when it is greater than 255 (Pixel value > 255). Second, the new constant base point for each pixel block is chosen differently for the sake of increasing the visual quality of the stego image. Third, we have adjusted the size of the pixel block which achieves a high embedding capacity while distorting the cover media from quad of quad (4 × 4 ) to quad, block of size 2 by 2 (2 × 2). Besides, the effect of varying the size of the secret data with respect to the quality of the stego image is also investigated throughout this study. Overall, based on the experimental results, good visual quality of the stego image which is evaluated by measuring the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and good embedding capacity (measured in bits) are yielded compared to the previous approach, i.e., the proposed method is effective in terms of maintaining both visual quality of the stego image and the embedding capacity. Index terms— Data hiding, information security, reduced difference expansion, digital steganography, cover image, stego image, confidential data =================================================================================================== Beberapa dekade terakhir internet telah menjadi jaringan luas yang memungkinkan banyak perusahaan di seluruh dunia untuk berinteraksi sambil berbagi data multimedia. Ini merupakan tanda bahwa infrastruktur internet telah tumbuh dan berkembang secara signifikan. Namun, teknologi ini memiliki banyak tantangan dalam hal pengamanan informasi yang bersifat sensitif dan pribadi sehingga mendorong penerapan teknik kriptografi untuk mengamankan data dengan cara mengenkripsinya. Teknik kriptografi memiliki kekurangan yaitu hasil enkripsi dapat dilihat oleh penyusup (intruders) selama transmisi sehingga menyebabkan kecurigaan yang berakibat pada tindakan akses yang bersifat ilegal. Untuk mengurangi hal ini, data hiding dapat dimanfaatkan untuk mengamankan informasi tersebut. Data hiding adalah salah satu teknik terbaik untuk mendapatkan data tetapi memiliki banyak tantangan permasalahan seperti pencurian identitas, phising, pelanggaran kebijakan jaringan dan hak cipta. Untuk mendapatkan kemanan data, data hiding memanfaatkan beberapa media untuk menyembunyikan informasi dan dapat diekstrak untuk memverifikasi keasliannya. Salah satu teknik data hiding yang paling terkenal adalah steganografi digital. Teknik ini menyembunyikan informasi rahasia kedalam file digital seperti citra digital, audio, video dan teks. Berbeda dengan kriptografi, steganografi memberikan keamanan informasi dengan menyamarkannya dalam file digital. Penyebab digunakannya tindakan ini adalah jika komunikasi terlihat maka akan mengundang kecurigaan yang mengakibatkan terjadi serangan seperti yang dijelaskan sebelumnya. Oleh karena itu, tujuan utama dari teknik ini adalah menyamarkan informasi rahasia dengan vi menyembunyikannya kedalam file yang digunakan. Akhir-akhir ini, beberapa teknik data hiding dengan menggunakan citra digital telah banyak dikembangkan oleh beberapa peneliti di seluruh dunia. Tujuan utama mereka adalah untuk meningkatkan keamanan, kapasitas penyisipan dan kualitas dari citra stego. Sampai saat ini, banyak penelitian yang menunjukkan bahwa masih menjadi tantangan untuk mendapatkan kualitas media stego yang baik dengan kapasitas penyisipan yang tinggi. Dengan maksud yang sama, penelitian ini mengusulkan konsep pendekatan baru dalam hal data hiding yang dapat meningkatkan kualitas dan kapasitas dari citra stego. Pendekatan tersebut dilakukan dengan cara meningkatkan metode data hiding yang sudah ada dengan memanfaatkan blok piksel, penentuan base point yang konsisten untuk masing-masing blok dan mereduksi difference expansion untuk citra abu-abu. Rincian dari pendekatan tersebut adalah sebagai berikut. Pertama, skema reduksi difference expansion (RDE) ditingkatkan untuk mendapatkan nilai terkecil yang akan digunakan dalam penyembunyian data kedalam citra carrier. Tujuannya adalah memungkinkan data dapat disisipkan dengan tetap menjaga kualitas citra stego tetap baik. Perlu diketahui bahwa usulan skema RDE tidak hanya meningkatkan kualitas tetapi juga menyelesaikan masalah overflow dan underflow. Underfow merupakan kondisi piksel dalam citra stego bernilai kurang dari 0 sedangkan overflow terjadi ketika nilai piksel melebihi 255. Kedua, base-point yang bersifat konstan untuk masing-masing blok piksel akan dipilih secara berbeda untuk dapat meningkatkan kualitas visual dari citra stego. Ketiga, kami mengatur ukuran blok dari quad of quad (4x4) yang memiliki kualitas citra stego kurang baik menjadi 2x2. Hal lain yang kami lakukan adalah mengetahui efek dari besar ukuran data yang digunakan dalam proses penyisipan. Secara keseluruhan, berdasarkan hasil eksperimen, usulan pendekatan ini memiliki kemampuan yang lebih baik dibandingkan dengan penelitian sebelumnya yang ditandai dengan kapasitas penyisipan yang lebih tinggi dan kualitas visual citra stego yang baik yang diukur menggunakan metode signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)

Secure digital documents using Steganography and QR Code

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonWith the increasing use of the Internet several problems have arisen regarding the processing of electronic documents. These include content filtering, content retrieval/search. Moreover, document security has taken a centre stage including copyright protection, broadcast monitoring etc. There is an acute need of an effective tool which can find the identity, location and the time when the document was created so that it can be determined whether or not the contents of the document were tampered with after creation. Owing the sensitivity of the large amounts of data which is processed on a daily basis, verifying the authenticity and integrity of a document is more important now than it ever was. Unsurprisingly document authenticity verification has become the centre of attention in the world of research. Consequently, this research is concerned with creating a tool which deals with the above problem. This research proposes the use of a Quick Response Code as a message carrier for Text Key-print. The Text Key-print is a novel method which employs the basic element of the language (i.e. Characters of the alphabet) in order to achieve authenticity of electronic documents through the transformation of its physical structure into a logical structured relationship. The resultant dimensional matrix is then converted into a binary stream and encapsulated with a serial number or URL inside a Quick response Code (QR code) to form a digital fingerprint mark. For hiding a QR code, two image steganography techniques were developed based upon the spatial and the transform domains. In the spatial domain, three methods were proposed and implemented based on the least significant bit insertion technique and the use of pseudorandom number generator to scatter the message into a set of arbitrary pixels. These methods utilise the three colour channels in the images based on the RGB model based in order to embed one, two or three bits per the eight bit channel which results in three different hiding capacities. The second technique is an adaptive approach in transforming domain where a threshold value is calculated under a predefined location for embedding in order to identify the embedding strength of the embedding technique. The quality of the generated stego images was evaluated using both objective (PSNR) and Subjective (DSCQS) methods to ensure the reliability of our proposed methods. The experimental results revealed that PSNR is not a strong indicator of the perceived stego image quality, but not a bad interpreter also of the actual quality of stego images. Since the visual difference between the cover and the stego image must be absolutely imperceptible to the human visual system, it was logically convenient to ask human observers with different qualifications and experience in the field of image processing to evaluate the perceived quality of the cover and the stego image. Thus, the subjective responses were analysed using statistical measurements to describe the distribution of the scores given by the assessors. Thus, the proposed scheme presents an alternative approach to protect digital documents rather than the traditional techniques of digital signature and watermarking

Optimization of medical image steganography using n-decomposition genetic algorithm

Protecting patients' confidential information is a critical concern in medical image steganography. The Least Significant Bits (LSB) technique has been widely used for secure communication. However, it is susceptible to imperceptibility and security risks due to the direct manipulation of pixels, and ASCII patterns present limitations. Consequently, sensitive medical information is subject to loss or alteration. Despite attempts to optimize LSB, these issues persist due to (1) the formulation of the optimization suffering from non-valid implicit constraints, causing inflexibility in reaching optimal embedding, (2) lacking convergence in the searching process, where the message length significantly affects the size of the solution space, and (3) issues of application customizability where different data require more flexibility in controlling the embedding process. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a technique known as an n-decomposition genetic algorithm. This algorithm uses a variable-length search to identify the best location to embed the secret message by incorporating constraints to avoid local minimum traps. The methodology consists of five main phases: (1) initial investigation, (2) formulating an embedding scheme, (3) constructing a decomposition scheme, (4) integrating the schemes' design into the proposed technique, and (5) evaluating the proposed technique's performance based on parameters using medical datasets from kaggle.com. The proposed technique showed resistance to statistical analysis evaluated using Reversible Statistical (RS) analysis and histogram. It also demonstrated its superiority in imperceptibility and security measured by MSE and PSNR to Chest and Retina datasets (0.0557, 0.0550) and (60.6696, 60.7287), respectively. Still, compared to the results obtained by the proposed technique, the benchmark outperforms the Brain dataset due to the homogeneous nature of the images and the extensive black background. This research has contributed to genetic-based decomposition in medical image steganography and provides a technique that offers improved security without compromising efficiency and convergence. However, further validation is required to determine its effectiveness in real-world applications