SteGhost: Hybrid Video Steganography with Encryption

Information security and data protection have attracted attention in the last few decades due to massive advancements in data transfer technologies. Accordingly, steganography, which aims to hide confidential data within other forms of media, has become a trending research area. This paper introduces a hybrid video steganography approach to conceal confidential data within videos to fortify the data against unauthorized access and tampering while being able to retrieve such data in a robust way. We compress the confidential information and encrypt it before performing the steganography step; thus, in order to retrieve the embedded data, the system supports a decryption process that requires a decryption key provided to the user at the time of embedding. This key ensures that only authorized users can access the concealed information, maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of the data throughout its lifecycle. We show in our experimental section the results of our hybrid approach embedding 48 MB of data leading to 0.11 bit difference, 4.39 seconds embedding time, 4.11 seconds retrieval time, and a capacity of 9,997,165 bits/frame. In other words, our hybrid approach provides an optimal trade-off between security, imperceptibility, and efficiency, making it a robust solution for sensitive data concealment.