Secure multi-level steganographic system as security measure to safeguard data transmission and sharing over the internet

Abstract

Recent advances in steganography systems have shown good results in bringing reliable data security over the Internet. However, these systems have their unique vulnerabilities since they are faced with a variety of threats from attackers. Effective steganography systems must be able to conceal hidden data completely as if there were nothing hidden on them. That is, they must be undetectable to steganalysis procedures from unauthorized individuals. This work proposes a secure multi-level steganography system to safeguard data transmission and sharing over the Internet, wherein_ cryptographic and steganographic techniques are combined. It also proposes compressing the cipher-text file using the Lempel-Ziv algorithm to reduce its size so that it uses less space in the cover image after data embedding. In this work, the use of Discrete Cosine Transform and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform for image processing is explained. Since they will be used in the process of image compression and decompression respectively. The results show this technique allows more data to be embedded and the quality of the reconstructed (stego) image is better compared to the previous stego applications.