Open Access

ARTICLE

Coverless Image Steganography System Based on Maze Game Generation

Al Hussien Seddik Saad¹, Mohammed S. Reda², Gamal M. Behery², Ahmed A. El-harby², Mohammed Baz³, Mohamed Abouhawwash^4,5,*, Ahmed Ismail Ebada⁶

1 Department of computer science, Faculty of Science, Minia University, Shalaby, Minia, Egypt
2 Department of computer science, Faculty of Computers and Artificial Intelligence, Damietta University, New Damietta, Damietta, Egypt
3 Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer and Information Technology, Taif University, P. O. Box 11099, Taif, 21994, Saudi Arabia
4 Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Mansoura University, Mansoura, 35516, Egypt
5 Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering (CMSE), College of Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA
6 Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computers and Artificial Intelligence, Damietta University, New Damietta, Damietta, Egypt

* Corresponding Author: Mohamed Abouhawwash. Email:

Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing 2023, 38(2), 125-138. https://doi.org/10.32604/iasc.2023.032084

Received 06 May 2022; Accepted 29 June 2022; Issue published 05 February 2024

Abstract

The trend of digital information transformation has become a topic of interest. Many data are threatening; thus, protecting such data from attackers is considered an essential process. Recently, a new methodology for data concealing has been suggested by researchers called coverless steganography. Coverless steganography can be accomplished either by building an image database to match its image subblocks with the secret message to obtain the stego image or by generating an image. This paper proposes a coverless image steganography system based on pure image generation using secret message bits with a capacity higher than the other traditional systems. The system uses the secret message to generate the stego image in the form of one of the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) games, the maze. Firstly, a full grid is generated with several specific rows and columns determined from the number of bits of the secret message. Then, these bits are fed to the full grid to form the maze game stego image. Finally, the generated maze game stego image is sent to the recipient. The experimental results, using the Bit Error Rate (BER), were conducted, and confirmed the strength of this system represented by a high capacity, perfect performance, robustness, and stronger hiding system compared with existing coverless steganography systems.

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Keywords

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