A Stego-Crypto-Based Technique for Multimedia Transmission

Document Type : Original Article

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to give new insights and directions on how to
improve existing methods of hiding secret messages, possibly by combining steganography
and cryptography. We start by a security background describing its history and a short
comparison between cryptography and steganography. We then illustrate our approach
that helps us achieve a higher level of secrecy and security. In such a way to make it
harder for any steganalyst to retrieve the plaintext of a secret message from a stego-
object if cryptanalysis were not used.
The MSPC has been exploited to bestow this proposed approach. MSPC relies for
its security on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers. The RSA generator is used as
a Stego-key for astonishing randomization of embedding the ciphertext into an innocent
image - which is the most popular cover objects used for steganography - to endow with
another layer of protection. It is proved that extracting any information about the plaintext
is hard for any eavesdropper with computational resources while maintaining the image
quality. Cryptography and Steganography procedures are completely reversible at the
receiver site.

Keywords