Designing a Model for Hiding Images in RGB Cover Image Based Scrambling and Encryption Methods

Abstract

In the digital world, one of the crucial issues is protecting information transmitted over a public network; therefore, encryption and steganography methods must be used to raise the level of data security. This paper invests scrambling and encryption techniques to protect data and compress it to reduce its size, thus increasing system performance. The system is built on protecting gray images after passing a set of steps. The first step denotes the scrambling stage that scatters the locations of gray images by adopting a logistic map method to make it difficult for intruders. The second step contains scattering the image again using the same method but with a different equation and then performing encryption based on the xor operation. The third step represents embedding the data and includes dividing the RGB cover image into three bands where each band is divided into (4×4) blocks, and the bits are stored in the location (2,2) from each band. It tested the system's efficiency by conducting experiments on a set of grayscale images and then using PSNR as a measurement function, where the result was 67.9705.