Classical or traditional steganography aims at hiding a secret in cover media such as text, image, audio, video or even in network protocols. Recent research has improved this approach called distributed steganography by fragmenting the secret message and embedding each secret piece into a distinct cover media. The major interest of this approach is to make the secret message detection extremely difficult. However, these file modifications leave fingerprints which can reveal a secret channel to an attacker. Our contribution is a new steganography paradigm transparent to any attacker and resistant to the detection and the secret extraction. Two properties contribute to achieve these goals: the files do not undergo any modification while the distribution of the secret in the multi-cloud storage environment allows us to hide the existence of the covert channel between the communicating parties. Information’s are usually hidden inside the cover media. In this work, the covert media is a pointer to information. Therefore the file carries the information without being modified and the only way to access it is to have the key. Experiments show interesting comparison results with remarkable security contributions. The work can be seen as a new open direction for further research in the field.

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Distributed steganography is an approach to concealing the secret in several files, leaving fewer traces than the classical approach. Recent work proposed by Moyou and Ndoumdan have improved this approach by preserving the integrity of these files in a multi-cloud storage environment. However, the approach requires a large size of the stego-key and the management of several cloud storage environments. Our contribution consists is to improve this approach by using a single cloud storage environment and reducing the size of the stego-key. In this work, a single cloud storage environment is used to solve the problems of managing several credentials, monetary costs and data controls associated with multi-cloud storage environments. The comparisons showed interesting results with simpler operations to be performed by the participants during the process.

Information has always constituted a prized commodity over time, with the strong globalization of exchanges and communications. The provenance, acquisition, protection and integrity of information has always asked major questions, with the strong growth of security needs in many areas around the world. Numerous approaches have been proposed with a view mainly to increase information security. One of them is steganography, where the goal is to conceal the very presence of secret information in a media during a communication. However, this one generally modifies the properties of the cover media used to conceal secret information. Thus, this modification constitutes a vulnerability during the detection and extraction of information concealed in the media, by various steganography attacks. To overcome this problem, Moyou and Ndoundam have proposed a distributed method of data hiding in a multi-cloud storage environment that preserves the property of the cover media, by using different types of media as an index of a part of the secret. However, a security problem is revealed when sharing key between the participating entities in the communication, and the process of managing cloud storage environments between the participating entities can turns to be tedious, depending on the number of cloud accounts used in the method. In order to solve these problems, in this paper we propose a new approach of the method that uses a single cloud storage environment, and strengthens the security of key sharing between the participating entities.