Message Concealment Techniques using Image based Steganography

Abstract

Image based steganography is the most popular method for message concealment. In this paper, two techniques are proposed for enhancing the message secrecy using image based steganography. The first technique is based on the use of punctuation marks to encode a secret message before embedding it into the image file. The second technique is based on the use of modified scytale cipher to hide a secret message in an image file. Both of these techniques have been implemented and tested using the S-Tools software package. The original and stego-images both are shown for the purpose of comparison. Index Terms — Image based steganography, Message concealment, LSB insertion, Scytale cipher