Video steganography using encrypted payload for satellite communication

In November 2014, a massive cyber-attack on a major company leaked sensitive data including thousands of personal records. Despite the fact that a lot of research and development has gone in the past decade to develop robust encryption algorithms, hackers have managed to break them. Effective information security is an important aspect and cannot be undermined in today's times. When an adversary intercepts encrypted data, it can be known that a secret message was sent. This can raise alarms and invite attacks. Moreover, many times it is important to communicate secretly without drawing any attention and not raise suspicion even if the message is intercepted. We feel that the key to heightened security is to not only encrypt the data but to hide the fact that secret message is being sent. This is implemented by steganography. Steganography is the science of concealing information (secret message) in an apparently innocuous media file (image, audio, video). We use an algorithm to hide the message inside the carrier (cover) media. Although steganography facilitates covert communication, it suffers from attacks like detection, modification, extraction and destruction. In this paper, we present a powerful combination of steganography and cryptography — a novel method to realize a highly secured level of communication. The proposed system encrypts the secret message via secure encryption algorithms and spreads it out over a broad bandwidth using spread spectrum technique. Then, we embed it into the cover media without affecting the perceptual fidelity as the amount of encoded information is below the threshold of perception and is regarded as noise. The original video is available at the receiver for successful retrieval of the secret message. This paper achieves additional security layer of data authentication and integrity check by adding a Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) module to the message. Further, we analyze the performance of the proposed technique towards different detection, modification and destruction attacks. The proposed blend of techniques showcases a higher immunity to these attacks while maintaining private, confidential communication. The proposed system is briefly discussed in the context of satellite communication.