International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering

Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2013)
347

A Survey of Information Hiding Techniques
Komal Patel
1
, Sumit Utareja
2
, Hitesh Gupta
3

1
CSE Department, Patel Institute of Technology, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India
2
Assistant Professor,
3
Head of Department, CSE Department, Patel Institute of Technology, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India
Abstract To protect your secret information from the
intruders it is necessary to convert information into
unidentified form. So it is impossible to get your original
information for intruders. So security is most challenging
aspects for all users who want to share their secret
information. With the wild growth of internet and the fast
communication techniques in recent years the security and the
confidentiality of the sensitive information has become of
prime and first importance and concern.
Information hiding is an art that involves communication
of secret information in an appropriate carrier, e.g., image,
video, audio etc. To protect information from unauthorized
access various methods for information hiding like
cryptography, stegnography, hashing, and authentication
have been developed and are in practice today. In this paper
we will be discussing one such information hiding techniques
called Steganography. Steganographys main goal is to hide
the very existence of secure information so its challenge for an
unauthorized party to find out secret information.
Steganography is the process of cover sensitive information in
any media to transfer it securely over the communication
network. Our paper presents a survey on various information
hiding techniques in steganography and evolution of different
existing image steganography techniques of information
hiding we conclude that researches and give some advantages
and disadvantages of that and describe our proposed method.
Keywords Information hiding, Encryption, Decryption,
Cryptography, Stegnography.
I. INTRODUCTION
In current age most of user use internet in computer,
mobile, laptop, tablets etc. in their daily use like as user do
their work at any place and send to receiver by using
internet. Some time user sends their secret information to
other user by using communication network. In this
information age there are so many intruders are eagerly
waiting for snatching the secret information, so it is our
first goal to protect our secret information. This paper is
dividing into four sections, First section is introduction
about information security, Second section is the literature
survey where we are presenting study of various research
paper and describing advantage and disadvantage of
various information hiding technique. Third section we are
presenting problem analysis.
Finally in fourth section our proposed work in which we
describe steps of our proposed work, conclusion and
reference
There are various techniques are available for secure
information like as cryptography, steganography, hasing
etc in cryptography user can convert their original data into
unreadable form so intruders cannot find original data.
Hash Functions uses a mathematical transformation to
irreversibly "encrypt" information [10].
Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden
messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender
and intend recipient, suspects the existence of the message,
a form of security through obscurity [1]. It Pronounced
"ste-g&-'n-Page Layout gr&-fE and Derived from Greek
roots Steganos = cover Graphie = writing Its ancient
origins can be traced back to 440 BC. Histories the Greek
historian Herodotus writes of a nobleman, Histaeus, who
used steganography first time [5]. The innocent files can be
referred to as cover text, cover image, or cover audio as
appropriate. After embedding the secret message it is
referred to as stego-medium. A stego-key is used to control
the hiding process so as to restrict detection and/or
recovery of the embedded data [2]. There are some
technologies that are closely related to steganography are
watermarking and fingerprinting. These technologies are
mainly concerned with the protection of intellectual
property. To provide security various techniques have been
used in past research. Steganography is the art and science
of hiding communication [3].
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
Steganalysis is the art of detecting the message's
existence and blockading the covert communication [6]
To give more perspectives of the performance of the
compared algorithms this section discusses the results
obtained from other resources:
M.Grace Vennice, Prof.Tv.Rao, M.Swapna and
Prof.J.Sasi kiran[4] proposed a new approach for text
steganography by creating a hybrid method in utilizing
whitespaces between words and paragraphs in right-
justification of text. In their paper they are propose the
following four parts.



International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2013)
348

1. Registration.
2. Encrypt text information.
3. Mapping through that XML schema.
4. Decrypt that information to another language of
environment.
The unique feature about the method is to generate a
cover-text dynamically by offering six options for user
according to their length of the secret message.
Mr. Vikas Tyagi [5] proposed a technique for data
hiding used on the LSB (least significant bit) and a new
encryption algorithm. In their technique first data is
encrypted using symmetric algorithm and then encrypted
data is hiding using LSB method. He used symmetric
algorithm for encrypt a data.
Harshitha K M, Dr. P. A. Vijaya[2] give an idea to
enhance the security of system by combining the two
techniques cryptography and stegnography. In their
techniques message is first encrypted and then embed in
cover file with help of steganographic system. For
encryption the secret message is randomly permuted using
the secret key. The random permutation is carried out by
using matlab functions rand and randperm. They used LSB
algorithm for both embedding and extraction process. They
did their entire work in MATLAB.
Shailender Gupta,Ankur Goyal and Bharat Bhushan [6]
used two techniques Rivest, Shamir, Adleman (RSA)
algorithm and Diffie Hellman algorithm to encrypt the data
then LSB is used to hide encrypted message. Their result
shows that the use of encryption in Steganalysis does not
affect the time complexity if Diffie Hellman algorithm is
used instead of RSA algorithm. To provide higher security
the secret information is encrypted first by using RSA or
Diffie Hellman algorithm and encrypted ASCII value is
converted in binary form. The image pixels at the same
time are also converted into binary form. The image is now
used as a cover to embed the encrypted information. This
process is done by LSB encoder which replaces the least
significant bit of pixel values with the encrypted
information bits. Upon reception of Stego image the
receiver firstly converts the pixels into their corresponding
binary values. The LSB decoder then detaches the
encrypted data from image pixel values. The encrypted data
is decrypted by decryption algorithms. They did their entire
work in MATLAB.
Joyshree Nath and Asoke Nath[7] introduced a new
method for hiding any encrypted secret message inside a
coverfile. For encrypting secret message the authors have
used new algorithm proposed by Nath et al. for encryption
they modified the idea of Play fair method into a new
platform where they can encrypt or decrypt any file.
They introduced a new randomization method for
generating the randomized key matrix to encrypt plain text
file and to decrypt cipher text file. They also introduced a
new algorithm for encrypting the plain text multiple times.
Their method is totally dependent on the random text key
which is to be supplied by the user. The maximum length
of the text key can be of 16 characters long and it may
contain any character (ASCII code 0 to 255).they
developed an algorithm to calculate the randomization
number and the encryption number from the given text key.
For hiding secret message in the cover file they inserted the
8 bits of each character of encrypted message file in 8
consecutive bytes of the cover file. They introduced
password for hiding data in the cover file. Their new
method could be appropriate for hiding any file in any
standard cover file such as image, audio, video files.
Dipti Kapoor Sarmah and Neha Bajpai [8] used advance
encryption standerd (AES) algorithm to encrypt a message
and a part of the message is hidden in DCT of an image.
They used three modules in their work for Cryptography -
Crypto Module, for Steganography - Stego Module, for
extra security - Security Module. In crypto module they
insert text for encryption then apply AES algorithm using
128 bit key and generate a cipher text in hexadecimal form.
Security Module used to modify the cipher text and to
generate two extra keys. Before the hiding process this
modules Separate the alphabets and digits from the cipher
text then separate the alphabets and digits from the cipher
text then Separate first seven alphabets retrieved from first
step and add the remaining alphabets at the end of the
separated digits as in the first step. This generates the
second key. In stego module take seven alphabets from the
Security Module then Scramble the alphabets using a 64 bit
key then take a Gray Scale Image then Find the DCT of the
Image then Hide the Cipher by altering DCTs then Apply
Inverse DCT then Find the Stego Image
Ankita Agaral [9] used S-DES algorithm to encrypt
secret message and then alteration component method is
used to hide encrypted message.
Phad Vitthal S., Bhosale Rajkumar S., Panhalkar
Archana R.[10] are used advanced encryption standard
(AES) algorithm to encrypt secret message and then pixel
value differencing (PVD) with K-bit least-significant-bit
(LSB) substitution is used to hide encrypted message into
true color RGB image.
III. PROBLEM ANALYSIS
From the study of research paper and other we conclude
that in [4] only hide the text information. There is no use of
cryptography on this paper.

International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2013)
349

We also analyzed that [2, 5, 6, 10] used LSB for hiding a
data it is easy to implement and high capacity. In [5] there
is no clarification about the configuration of machine and
platform where all the experiment is calculating. [5] There
is no specification which symmetric algorithm used. [2]
Used permutation techniques for encryption but
Permutation techniques are attractive due to their
efficiency. But the drawbacks of these techniques are
evident in terms of generated key and security. [8, 10] used
AES and [9] used S-DES algorithm for encryption. But
from [11] we conclude that after comparison between AES,
DES, 3DESand Blowfish in terms of Encryption time,
Decryption time and Throughput Blowfish has better
performance. Also from [12] we conclude comparison
between AES, DES and BLOWFISH basis of parameters
like as speed, block size, and key size prove that
BLOWFISH has a better performance than other common
encryption algorithm
The above cases showing that using the existing
algorithm like S-DES algorithm, AES and other algorithm
which is mentioned in [8, 9 and 10] resulted in a lower
encryption time decryption time, throughput, speed, block
size and a lower key size.
IV. PROPOSED METHOD
The sequential steps of proposed method to secure the
secret information from sender side are summarized as
follows:
1. Choose file to be secure.
2. Convert original information file into encrypted file
using BLOWFISH algorithm.
3. Hide encrypted file using LSB approach and generate
stego image.
The sequential steps of proposed method to secure the
secret information from receiver side are summarized as
follows:
1. Choose stego image.
2. Extract encrypted file using LSB approach.
3. Decrypt encrypted file using BLOWFISH algorithm
and find out original information file.
For higher security first of all proposed work uses
BLOWFISH algorithm to encrypt secret information then
encrypted information is hide by LSB approach. Block
diagram of proposed system is given below.



V. CONCLUSION
In todays information age, the technologies have
developed so much that most of the user prefer internet to
transfer data from one end to another across the world .So
privacy in digital communication is basic requirement
when confidential information is being shared between two
users. In this paper we reviewed how data security is
necessary for secure transaction in World Wide Web. We
also discuss different techniques which are developed for
information hiding. And also describe some advantages and
disadvantages of these techniques. To remove
disadvantages of these we develop a new technique for
information hiding which is combination of cryptography
and stegnography. Our proposed method gives a double
security for data hiding. In this paper we also give some
introduction about our feature work.
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International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2013)
350

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