LSB based Steganography Techniques for Data Transmission Security

Abstract

Steganography is a data hiding technique which is used to prevent the data or any relevant information from falling to the hands of an unauthorized personal. So, in order to prevent such scenario the steganographic method is used using LSB matching technique in which the LSB of the pixels of the cover media is replaced with that of the relevant information and the cover media is chosen based on characteristics known to only the sender and receiver and no one else can access it. The steganographic technique can find its relevance and scope in merely many field like Marketing, MNC's, Industry, Medical, Research and Defense etc. Like any other data hiding method it is also based on 3 key parameters: a) Robustness; how well and unaltered the information is transferred from on e-party to the other. Based on this it is preferred using formats like BMP which are lossless rather than JPEG which are lossy, b) Capacity; how much payload/data can it carry in a single transaction. Ideally the relative payload that an steganographic image can hold is ≈ 1% of the image, so that, it could be undetectable the bigger the media the more is the payload but there is a word of caution a sudden a large exchange of file has chance of suspicion, c) Security; how securely the data can be transferred from one party to other. The literature review has been done by keeping in mind to obtain ideas and techniques to detect and improve as much as possible to the steganographic techniques and through research and work done on MATLAB software, were able to detect LSB based steganographic encrypted image from the others. To this some remarks were added to improve the security and evident in result section.