Open Access
ARTICLE
A Novel Approach of Image Steganography for Secure Communication Based on LSB Substitution Technique
Shahid Rahman1, Fahad Masood2, Wajid Ullah Khan2, Niamat Ullah1, Fazal Qudus Khan3, Georgios Tsaramirsis3, Sadeeq Jan4, *, Majid Ashraf5
1 University of Buner, Buner, 19290, Pakistan.
2 Abasyn University, Peshawar, 25000, Pakistan.
3 Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, 21577, Saudi Arabia.
4 National Center for Cyber Security-UETP, Department of CS & IT, University of Engineering & Technology, Peshawar, 25000, Pakistan.
5 Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Engineering & Technology, Peshawar, 25000, Pakistan.
* Corresponding Author: Sadeeq Jan. Email: .
Computers, Materials & Continua 2020, 64(1), 31-61. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.09186
Received 19 November 2019; Accepted 03 March 2020; Issue published 20 May 2020
Abstract
Steganography aims to hide the messages from unauthorized persons for various
purposes, e.g., military correspondence, financial transaction data. Securing the data during
transmission is of utmost importance these days. The confidentiality, integrity, and
availability of the data are at risk because of the emerging technologies and complexity in
software applications, and therefore, there is a need to secure such systems and data. There
are various methodologies to deal with security issues when utilizing an open system like
the Internet. This research proposes a new technique in steganography within RGB shading
space to achieve enhanced security compared with existing systems. We evaluate our
approach with the help of diverse image quality evaluation techniques including MSE
(Mean Square Error), RMSE (Root Mean Square Error), PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise
Ratio), MAE (Mean Absolute Error), NCC (Normalized Cross-Correlation) and SSIM
(Structural Similarity Index). Our experimental results demonstrate improved strength,
intangibility, and security when contrasted with existing techniques and vindicate the
effectiveness of this exploration work. The proposed approach achieved a 3.6701% average
higher score for PSNR Correlation than the next best existing approach. Moreover, in
PSNR with a variable amount of cipher embedded in the same images of the same
dimensions, the proposed approach attained a 5.22% better score. Embedding the same size
of cipher in images of different size resulted a 3.56% better score.
Keywords
Cite This Article
S. Rahman, F. Masood, W. Ullah Khan, N. Ullah, F. Qudus Khan
et al., "A novel approach of image steganography for secure communication based on lsb substitution technique,"
Computers, Materials & Continua, vol. 64, no.1, pp. 31–61, 2020. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.09186
Citations