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     A Novel Approach to Enhance the Security of the LSB Image Steganography


A Novel Approach to Enhance the Security of the LSB Image Steganography

1Morteza Bashardoost, 1Mohd Shafry Mohd Rahim, 2Ayman Altameem and 3Amjad Rehman
1Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, 81310 Johor, Malaysia
2College of Applied Studies and Community Services, King Saud University, Riyadh, KSA
3College of Business Administration, Salman Bin Abdul Aziz University, Riyadh, KSA
A Novel Approach to Enhance the Security of the LSB Image Steganography  2014  19:3957-3963
http://dx.doi.org/10.19026/rjaset.7.754  |  © The Author(s) 2014
Received: April 01, 2013  |  Accepted: May 03, 2013  |  Published: May 15, 2014

Abstract

Forming a logical balance between the quality of the file and the scope of data that can be conveyed is the test of steganographic techniques to form such a balance. On top of that, the facts that cannot be covered up are the robustness of the method and security of the vague data. An insertion method which delivers a high level of visual quality and a huge amount of volume for the obscured data is called the Least Significant Bit (LSB), but the concealed message is poorly secured through this technique. In the recommended approach, the Vigenere encryption techniques initially used to encode the secret data to assure the safety of the concealed message. Later, the data is contracted through the Huffman coding method in order to decrease the occupational volume of the classified data. Then, each bit stream of the data is dispersed out onto the image to enhance the robustness of the technique by using the expanded knight tour algorithm. The outcomes show that apart from enhancing the visual quality of the stego image, the recommended technique enhances the safety and payload capacity issues of the simple LSB technique.

Keywords:

Huffman coding compression, image steganography, knight tour embedding algorithm, LSB insertion technique, vigenere encryption,


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Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.

ISSN (Online):  2040-7467
ISSN (Print):   2040-7459
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