Hiding Information in Digital Images Using LSB Steganography Technique

Abstract

The highest way to protect data from intruder and unauthorized persons has become a major issue. This matter led to the development of many techniques for data security, such as Steganography, Cryptography, and Watermarking to disguise data. This paper proposes an image steganography method using the Least Significant Bits (LSB) technique and XOR operator and a secret key, through which the secret key is transformed into a one-dimensional bit stream array, then these bits are XORed with the bits of the secret image. Multiple experiments have been performed to embed color and grayscale images inside cover media. In this work, the LSB technique is ideal in two ways: firstly, only the least significant one-bit (1bit) of each byte will store the embedded data, this method is named (1-LSB). Secondly, the four least significant bits of the right half-byte (4 bits) of each byte will store the embedded data, this method is named (4-LSB). Subjective and objective analyzes were performed for each LSB process. The subjective analysis is responsible for both HVS and histogram, whereas the objective analysis involved both PSNR and MSE metrics.