Unseen to Seen by Digital Steganography: Modern-Day Data-Hiding Techniques

Unseen to Seen by Digital Steganography: Modern-Day Data-Hiding Techniques

Samir Kumar Bandyopadhyay, Vishal Goyal, Shawni Dutta, Sabyasachi Pramanik, Hafiz Husnain Raza Sherazi
Copyright: © 2021 |Pages: 28
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-7160-6.ch001
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Abstract

In this digital era, most of the daily works of users are captured in digital forms like image, audio, video, or even text. These may contain sensitive, confidential, or private information as well. To keep these, there are different techniques exercised over the years like chest, coffer, repository, treasury, etc. Sometimes such ways of hiding information attract unintended users. Therefore, steganography has been applied to digital objects in a new form called digital steganography. This chapter enforces identifying methods in digital steganography. The basic model of any type of digital steganography is composed of three types of objects: cover object, text to be hidden, and stego object. Depending on the type of cover object, different types of digital steganography methods have been defined. Only data hiding in text is discussed.
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1. Introduction

Today the Internet has become a trusted process of information transmission for everyone. The healthcare industry also upgrades itself by sharing electronic health records of patients digitally and can transmit to other places, if necessary. E-Governance (Aithal, P. S., 2016). system is the basic moto of all sectors in the globe. This information is the burning target of intruders in today’s e-world. Therefore secure communication becomes a challenge today. This challenge brings information security to a level that now-a-days is treated as a subject to academics and a challenging research area to the researcher of every corner in the world. The chapter is also dedicated to secure communication using steganography (Pramanik, S. et al, 2019) (Pramanik, S. and Raja, S. S., 2017) methods. The main focus of the chapter is to explain thoroughly image steganography based on histogram. Three steganography methods are explained briefly and results are also given after each method. However, method for data hiding within the text is only defined since it may itself a chapter.

1.1. Brief Overview

The concept of steganography is to hide messages during transmission so that it is not noticeable in the naked eye. Secret message is hidden inside the entire message in such a way that it is only visible to the particular person. It works based on the invisible communication. The process of steganography system is shown in box 1.

Box 1. The Steganography System
Process:
  Step 1: Cover image and target secret image are the input to the process of embedding.
  Step 2: The output is stego image.
  Step 3: It is input to process of extraction.
  Step 4: The output is target secret image.

Steganography system is a function of M, method, and is defined by S = M (C, I) where C is cover media and I is secret information. The reverse process is called extraction (Mahato, S., Khan, D. A. and Yadav, D. K, 2020) of the secret message.

An effective steganographic scheme should meet following challenges. These are given below.

  • Imperceptibility (Mukherjee S. and Sanyal G., 2020) indicates the stego file (Hambouz, A., et al. 2019) is not distinguishable from the original cover file.

  • Capacity (Duan, X. et al, 2020) contains the maximum amount of secret information in a cover file.

  • Robustness (Eyssa, A.A., Abdelsamie, F.E. and Abdelnaiem, 2020) ensures that it is not possible to extract secret information from stego file.

Robustness is the ultimate goal of steganography for hiding the secret text properly.

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