Lossless steganography: An approach for hiding text under image cover

Steganography helps in secret communication in such a way that the unintended person is prevented from detection of the existence of the secret data or information. The goal of this paper is to introduce a technique to encrypt a text message and embed it with an cover image[1] file. The main idea is to encrypt the message by reversing, swapping and circular right shifting with randomly generated key and embedding each data bit to the pixel matrix of the image cover starting from 1st bit position(1,1,1). Whenever we want to extract the encrypted text from that cover image and decrypt the text too, the pixel values (embedded with text) of the image are converted into its decimal equivalent and print the character value of those decimal bit values and after that circular left shifting with the random key value(generated at the time of encryption), swapping and reversing are done to get the decrypted as well as the original message. This is lossless[2] encryption as there is no any chance to lose information. The main advantage of this method is minimal distortion of the image and lesser complexity. The complexity of the method is O(n³).