LSB Technique-Based Dual-Image Steganography Using COS Function

ABSTRACT

Due to the advancement in technology, the exchange of information via a network has been taking such a great peak that each and every person is highly dependent on the Internet, like in the current Covid-19 pandemic situation. But sharing information/secret medical data by means of the Internet has created a risk to the information loss. Thus, data exchange should be done in such a way that its presence cannot be perceived by the third party with bad intentions and should not be able to modify or alter the important message. For the safety of important data, many algorithms like cryptography, steganography, watermarking, etc. have been used by researchers to safeguard data sharing via an insecure Internet. Cryptography and steganography together can provide better security to the data as one encrypts the data and the other hides its presence in multimedia, like image, audio, video, etc. In this paper, data encryption and image steganography have been presented to provide security to the message that is being transferred through the Internet. The experimental outcomes show that the proposed technique is able to transfer important data securely without coming into the eyes of a hacker. The PSNR value for the proposed system is about 51.14 with 1 bit per pixel (bpp) capacity. As per the security view, the presented method has a 7.99 entropy value, which means the system is secure against attacks.