Data hiding in images using some efficient steganography techniques

Abstract

Steganography is the art of hiding data in a seemingly innocuous cover medium. For example - any sensitive data can be hidden inside a digital image. Steganography provides better security than cryptography because cryptography hides the contents of the message but not the existence of the message. So no one apart from the authorized sender and receiver will be aware of the existence of the secret data. Steganographic messages are often first encrypted by some traditional means and then a cover image is modified in some way to contain the encrypted message. The detection of steganographically encoded packages is called steganalysis. In this paper, we propose three efficient Steganography techniques that are used for hiding secret messages. They are LSB based Steganography, Steganography using the last two significant bits and Steganography using diagonal pixels of the image. Symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography has been used to encrypt the message. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.