Dual-layer security of image steganography based on IDEA and LSBG algorithm in the cloud environment

Abstract

The architecture development of cloud computing technology is growing tremendously in recent times, which leads to improvement of scalability, accessibility and cost reduction measures in the IT sectors of all enterprises. In this service, the data storage without reviewing security policies and procedures is a challenging task and probabilities of extracting secret information by an unauthorized intervention are more. However, to prevent the breaches of security in the cloud service, the steganography art plays an essential role in the data communication medium to improve the security measures, and it is an indispensable technique for hiding the secret information into a cover object. This paper describes the implementation of new steganography method with International Data Encryption Standard Algorithm (IDEA) and Least Significant Bit Grouping (LSBG) algorithm for embedding the secret information into an original image and extracting the same. The result shows the improvement of data embedding capacity and reduces the issues related to data security by effective utilization of this new approach, which reveals the remarkable achievement of the combinational execution of steganography and cryptography technique. The IDEA and LSBG have some vital qualities such as data confidentiality, integrity verification, capacity and robustness, which are crucial factors to achieve successful implementation of steganography process in data security system. The effectiveness and properties of the stego image can be evaluated by some specific measures like mean squared error, root mean squared error, peak signal to noise ratio and structural similarity index matrix to analyse the image quality. The results show that the proposed technique outperforms the existing methodologies and resolves the data security problem in data transmission and storage system of cloud computing services.