( Using LSB Technique )

By: Antarip Pal Kaushik Mal Amit Kumar Supervised By: Pratal Mondal

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Taking the third letter in each word the following message emerges:

Send lawyers guns and money

INTRODUCTION
What is Image steganography?
The word Steganography comes from the Greek steganos (covered or secret) and graphy (writing or drawing) and thus means,

literally, covered writing. Steganography is the branch of science, it

is used for writing hidden messages in such a way that no one can able to read the message only the sender and receiver can read.

Steganography attempts to hide the existence of communication.

 Why image steganography ?

Secret communication rather than secure. Forensics investigation.

Steganography came under focus while CIA was investigating this tragedy. Al-Qaeda used image steganography 12 yrs back now its become a major concern for investigating agencies all over the world.

 Structure of Image steganography :

The basic structure of Steganography is made up of three components:

The Carrier image

The Message The Key The carrier can be a painting, or a digital image. It is the object that will carry the hidden message. A key is used to

decode/decipher/discover the hidden message. This can be anything

from a password, a pattern, a black-light etc.

 Image steganography system

H I D I N G

E X T R A C T I N G

STEGANOGRAPHY V/S CRYPTOGRAPHY

STEGANOGRAPHY
Unknown message passing. Steganography prevents discovery of the very existence of communication. Once detected message is known. Steganography does not alter message structure.

CRYPTOGRAPHY
Known message passing. Encryption prevents an unauthorized party from understanding the contents of a communication. Larger expensive computing power is required for cracking. Cryptography alter the structure of message.

LEAST SIGNIFICANT BIT METHOD (LSB)

The simplest and most common type of steganography is LSB (least significant bit). The ones bit of a byte is used to encode the hidden information. The application we developed, we have used 24-bit color bitmap image. Each pixel in this image file consist of 3 one byte color component, blue, green and red. The least significant bit of each

component is replaced by a bit of a character. Thus a pixel can hide 3 bit

of a character and of 8 pixels can hide 3 characters keeping image distortion at a minimum level.

 STEP 1
Count the number of character in the file : Convert entire message into binary and store it a temporary file:

0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0

0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1

. .

 STEP 2
Read bmp_header of source image : Include character count in reserved space and write updated header on disk :

Read Header

Update

Updated Header

 STEP 3
Read palette data of source Image :

Pixel of image

LSB

1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0

LSB

B
Cover image

1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 R LSB
G

1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0

 STEP 4
Replace the least significant bit by one bit of data to be hidden :

01001000

1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0

1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1
New pixel data of Image

10110011 0 10110010

 STEP 5
Write updated palette data to output image :
Pixel s with updated data

1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 B

1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 R

Steganographed image

1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0

 STEP 1
Read reserved field from bmp_header to get the number of hidden character : Read pixel data of steganographed Image :

Pixel of image

1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0

B
Steganographed image

1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 R

1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 G

 STEP 2
Extracting least significant bit from pixel data binary:

10011100

10101110

10110011

. .

01001000

 STEP 3
Conversion of binary into message data :

01001000

0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1

. .

Future Considerations and Conclusion

Future Work
As hidden messege can be retrieved by anybody once it is identified, our further objective is to combine steganography with crytography. It will incorporate key mechanism and encrypt message before hiding.

Conclusion
The LSB technique described in this project helps to successfully hide the
secret data into the cover file with minimum distortion made to the cover file. As presented, LSB Embedding has the advantage that it is simple to implement. But LSB Embedding is relatively insecure, at least in its primitive form. However, due to its

advantages, it is useful for applications where security is desired, but not necessary. It is also a good foundation to build more secure steganography techniques.

THANK YOU
Any Question?