A Hybrid Secured Approach Combining LSB Steganography and AES using Mosaic Image for Ensuring Data Security

• LSB Matching
• Steganography
• Mosaic Images
• AES

Presented at 7th International Conference on Cyber Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (ICCS) 2021. Available Online at SN Computer Science

Steganography is a technique of hiding information in digital media such as images, text, audio etc. This digital media is used as the cover to make the private message invisible. Apparently, the attackers don’t have any idea about the original message that is being hidden in the cover media. In this project, the proposed technique has focused on implementing the LSB matching steganography algorithm. For ensuring better security, the AES cryptography technique is used before applying the steganography technique to ensure two-layer security of the private message. Another feature that is used in this project is using mosaic images as the cover media. Mosaic image is capable of hiding up to five LSB layers. Different survey papers show that the success rate of using mosaic images as the cover media is approximately 99% comparing with approximately 50% the success of normal image in case of data hiding. Our proposed approach overcomes the problem of stego image distortion by using mosaic images. The improved LSB steganography algorithm also effectively handles mosaic images. Using a better version of LSB, Stego images were given more excellent PSNR value than other approaches when the hidden message was integrated into the mosaic image. Compared with different space domain strategies, the PSNR value of our proposed system is 85.65 dB for a maximum text capacity of 32 bytes.