Multiple Keys Combination Method for Data Hiding Using Least Significant Bits

Abstract

In today’s world where the digital exchange of information becomes a vital issue, the need for secure communication has been more critical. Using the Internet as data transmission, web technology, and cloud services ensure the need for data security. This paper proposes a novel technique that uses a combination of multiple cryptographic keys for hiding data in RGB images via Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution. The method employs four 64-bit keys, generated through a SHA-256 hash of 256 randomly selected bytes from the Most Significant Bits (MSBs) of the cover image. The secret message is divided into 8-bytes (64-bits) blocks. Each of these blocks is encrypted by using XOR operation with the corresponding key. The encrypted blocks of secret message are embedded across two of the RGB channels based on key-derived directions. The proposed technique is implemented and evaluated using PSNR, MSE, SNR, SSIM, and capacity performance metric. Experimental results demonstrate high imperceptibility and robust performance, evaluated using metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, MSE, and embedding capacity.