An Improved Quality and Security of LSB Based Steganography Technique Using XOR Bitwise Operation in 24 Bit Color Image

Abstract

Information privacy has become the overborne issue today with the increasing use and efficiency of electronic data processing. The main purpose on privacy of communication is to provide secure connection with target without being captured by the third persons or by bringing them in such a way that they cannot understand. In the most general sense, steganography is the study and practice of concealing information to provide security of communication. The classic LSB (least significant bit) technique and methods which are derived from classic lsb, are used in steganography techniques on spatial domains. For the case of security, the classic LSB technique is very weak because it is very simple and predictable. Also, it causes distortion of image. In this paper, we propose an improved LSB Steganography technique to increase security and decrease the distortion of image. The proposed method is based on hiding two bits of secret data in one color (rgb) pixel with only one least significant bit change in one of the layers. LSB value of red layer is used in XOR operation with both LSB values of green and blue layers respectively. Only with one LSB bit change, 2 bits of secret data can be hidden, because nature of XOR bitwise operation. XOR operation provide the more secure and unpredictable communication than classic LBS. This method performed on to different images. Furthermore, it observed that the improved method reveals good result as the "Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR)" and "Mean Square Error (MSE)" than classic LSB method.