Enhanced Efficiency and Security in LSB2 Steganography: Burst Embedding and Private Key Integration

Abstract

In the realm of digital colour image steganography, the utilisation of an image key for the extraction of essential covering stego-bytes from predetermined secret positions was explored. The traditional Least Significant Bit (LSB) and LSB2 methodologies were streamlined by substituting the logical operations within both the hiding and extraction functions with straightforward assignment operations. An enhancement was introduced to the LSB2 steganographic methods for secret message conveyance without compromising data hiding capacity. Instead of the conventional character-by-character embedding seen in the LSB2 method, the binary code of the concealed message was embedded in a burst manner within the covering image. Similarly, the extraction from the stego image was conducted in a burst fashion, leading to a reduction in the processes required for both data hiding and extraction. As a result, shorter hiding and extraction durations were achieved, culminating in augmented data steganography throughput. For bolstering message security against potential breaches, the proposed ULSB2 method integrated a confidential private key (PK) composed of two double values. This key provisioned the necessary key space to deter hacking endeavours. A comparative analysis was conducted between the outcomes derived from the ULSB2 method and those of prevailing techniques to delineate the enhancements in both quality and speed of message steganography.