FPGA Implementation of a Novel Image Steganography for Hiding Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel FPGA-based image steganography method that encrypts and hides a smaller secret image within a host image using XOR operations, enhancing data security and implementation efficiency.

Contribution

A new FPGA implementation of image steganography that encrypts and embeds a secret image into a host image using XOR-based distortion, with hardware/software design details.

Findings

Effective encryption with entropy close to 8.

Successful embedding of a quarter-sized secret image.

Hardware implementation on FPGA demonstrated efficiency.

Abstract

As the complexity of current data flow systems and according infrastructure networks increases, the security of data transition through such platforms becomes more important. Thus, different areas of steganography turn to one of the most challengeable topics of current researches. In this paper a novel method is presented to hide an image into the host image and Hardware/Software design is proposed to implement our stagenography system on FPGA- DE2 70 Altera board. The size of the secret image is quadrant of the host image. Host image works as a cipher key to completely distort and encrypt the secret image using XOR operand. Each pixel of the secret image is composed of 8 bits (4 bit-pair) in which each bit-pair is distorted by XORing it with two LSB bits of the host image and putting the results in the location of two LSB bits of host image. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the most recently proposed algorithms by considering that the obtained information entropy for encrypt image is approximately equal to 8.