Development of a Compression Aided Multi-level Steganography

Abstract

A lot of techniques are used to protect the information such as information hiding. Steganography is one of the information hiding Techniques that hide a message inside another message without drawing any suspicion. In this research, there is a combination of both text steganography ( level one in our model) and image steganography (level two in our model). Level one uses a new approach that is based on the Pseudo Random Number Generation (PRNG) to embed the secret message into Randomly Cover-text generated. Level Two uses a cover image to embed the message by using the LSB insertion technique that produces the Stego-image. Between these levels the compression process (Huffman Compression Algorithm) receives the output of level one (Stego-Text) and compresses it to reduce the size and then passes it as an input to level two. Two secret keys (Hiding Key, & Extraction Key) for authentication at both ends in order to achieve high level of security. At the receiver side different reverse operations have been carried out to get back the original information. The analysis shows that the model has a good measure of hiding the secret message, and good image quality that carried the information.