A SECRET-KEY IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE USING RANDOM CHAIN CODES

With the wide range use of digital communication technologies, the Internet has been commonly used as a channel for transmitting various images. Steganography practises have been implemented for achieving such secure transmission. The main focus of steganography is data hiding where, digital images are utilized as the cover image. One of the image steganography techniques is based on LSB method, where the secret message bits are embedded sequentially in LSB of the bytes of the carrier image. This makes the hidden message vulnerable to detection by attackers. Many secret key image steganography techniques have been developed as alternative techniques to achieve a high level of security for the hidden secret message. But, these techniques failed to use the full capacity of the carrier image. In this paper, a secret key image steganography technique has been implemented using chains of a random sequence of indices (codes) of the bytes in the carrier image. These chains have been constructed based on the secret key used. This makes the hidden message more secure and difficult to depict by attackers. Furthermore, the proposed technique uses the full capacity of the carrier image. Visual and numerical tests have been conducted for the performance of the proposed technique, the recorded results proved it can be used effectively in the field of information hiding.