Prudently Secure Information Theoretic LSB Steganography for Digital Grayscale Images

Abstract

The endangerment of online data breaches calls for exploring new and enhancing existing sneaky ways of clandestine communication to tailor those to match the present and futuristic technological and environmental needs, to which malicious intruders wouldn't have an answer. Cryptography and Steganography are the two distinct techniques that, for long, have remained priority choices for hiding vital information from the unauthorized. But the visibility of the encrypted contents makes these vulnerable to attack. Also, the recent legislative protection agreed to law enforcement authorities in Australia to sneak into pre-shared cryptographic secret keys (PSKs) shall have a devastating impact on the privacy of the people. Hence, the need of the hour is to veil in the encrypted data underneath the cover of Steganography, whose sole intent is to hide the very existence of information. This research endeavor enhances one of the most famous images Steganography technique called the Least Significant Bit (LSB) Steganography, from the security and information-theoretic standpoint by taking a known-cover and known-message attack scenario. The explicit proclamation of this research endeavor is that the security of LSB Steganography lies in inducing uncertainty at the time of bit embedding process. The test results rendered by the proposed methodology confers on the non-detectability and imperceptibility of the confidential information along with its strong resistance against LSB Steganalysis techniques.