A Study to Improve Image Steganography Using Linear Feedback Shift Register

Concealing data during communicating is often a security requirement. Image steganography is one way to do that by hiding data in the cover image. Least Significant Bit (LSB) insertion is one of the spatial domain methods, wherein, a message is concealed in the least significant bits of the pixels composing an image. However, such technique is vulnerable to various attacks. Furthermore, low-cost hardware is essential to employ steganography in lightweight security applications. This paper, thus, proposes a way to improve LSB based image Steganography by integrating a Linear-Feedback Shift Register (LFSR), as a low cost hardware, in the hiding process in such a way that the message is hidden in a pseudorandom fashion. Thereafter, the efficiency of the improved algorithm is analyzed and compared to the original algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed LSB based image Steganography which successfully hides the message with a linear computational complexity.