A novel approach to steganography: Enhanced least significant bit substitution algorithm integrated with self-determining encryption feature

Abstract

One of the most well-known and used algorithms for Steganography is Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution. Although LSB has several advantages such as simplicity, efficiency, and easy-to-do implementation, it has some distinct disadvantages such as it openness to miscellaneous attacks. In this study, we aim to improve the traditional LSB algorithm by eliminating its main disadvantage, being easy to detect, and this way propose an enhanced LSB algorithm called E-LSB. We mainly aim to minimize differences which are due to encryption and image hiding steps in LSB algorithm and make it more difficult to notice that some text has been hidden in the original cover image. As most of the researchers and practitioners in security field argue, stenographic techniques alone are not sufficient for protecting sensitive information and thus must be used together with encryption algorithms. Therefore, the proposed approach integrates E-LSB with an encryption algorithm. E-LSB does not modify the file size and allows the flexibility of choosing one of well-known encryption algorithms including RSA, AES and CAESAR, but others can be implemented in it. With a set of experiments, the proposed approach is compared with the traditional LSB based embedding approach, and its efficiency and usability is analyzed. A set of performance evaluations realized with the developed software tool based on E-LSB algorithm show that E-LSB is better than the traditional LSB algorithm from security point of view.