A Hash based Approach for Secure Keyless Steganography in Lossless RGB Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hash-based, secure, and high-capacity steganography method for lossless RGB images that uses random distribution, all color channels, and compression to enhance security and storage efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining hash-based distribution, multi-channel embedding, and compression to improve security and capacity in image steganography.

Findings

Higher storage capacity than existing methods

Enhanced security through random message distribution

Minimal image degradation with single-bit modifications

Abstract

This paper proposes an improved steganography approach for hiding text messages in lossless RGB images. The objective of this work is to increase the security level and to improve the storage capacity with compression techniques. The security level is increased by randomly distributing the text message over the entire image instead of clustering within specific image portions. Storage capacity is increased by utilizing all the color channels for storing information and providing the source text message compression. The degradation of the images can be minimized by changing only one least significant bit per color channel for hiding the message, incurring a very little change in the original image. Using steganography alone with simple LSB has a potential problem that the secret message is easily detectable from the histogram analysis method. To improve the security as well as the image embedding capacity indirectly, a compression based scheme is introduced. Various tests have been done to check the storage capacity and message distribution. These testes show the superiority of the proposed approach with respect to other existing approaches.