A novel approach of image steganography for secure communication based on LSB substitution technique

Abstract

Steganography aims to hide the messages from unauthorized persons for various purposes, e.g., military correspondence, financial transaction data. Securing the data during transmission is of utmost importance these days. The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data are at risk because of the emerging technologies and complexity in software applications, and therefore, there is a need to secure such systems and data. There are various methodologies to deal with security issues when utilizing an open system like the Internet. This research proposes a new technique in steganography within RGB shading space to achieve enhanced security compared with existing systems. We evaluate our approach with the help of diverse image quality evaluation techniques including MSE (Mean Square Error), RMSE (Root Mean Square Error), PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio), MAE (Mean Absolute Error), NCC (Normalized Cross-Correlation) and SSIM (Structural Similarity Index). Our experimental results demonstrate improved strength, intangibility, and security when contrasted with existing techniques and vindicate the effectiveness of this exploration work. The proposed approach achieved a 3.6701% average higher score for PSNR Correlation than the next best existing approach. Moreover, in PSNR with a variable amount of cipher embedded in the same images of the same dimensions, the proposed approach attained a 5.22% better score. Embedding the same size of cipher in images of different size resulted a 3.56% better score.