Least Significant Bit but Quantum Bit: A Quasi Stego

INTRODUCTION

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In the present scenario, the marked up dependence on technology have lead to vulnerable privacy. This brings out more desire for security to rectify privacy in virtual realm. Hence, the term data encryption evolved simultaneously which was widely used to ensure the protection of information. Encryption is the method that imparts the content of the messages unintelligible to the persons who are not authorized to read it. It is simply the translation of a message into secret code. And to read that encrypted code, you need to have the secret key to decrypt the message.

There is an interesting sub discipline of information hiding called steganography. It is an art of maintaining secrecy of transmission of any message so that it is not even susceptible to an intruder. The term steganography has its provenance from the Greek words, “Stego” means “Cover” and “Graphy” means “Writing”. It is otherwise called as concealed writing (Amirtharajan and Rayappan, 2012a-c, 2013; Amirtharajan et al., 2013a- j; Cheddad et al., 2010). It is a variant cryptography for data security (Praveenkumar et al., 2014a-n, 2013a-d, 2012a, b). Whereas, cryptography is a method for maintaining confidentiality or simple privacy of data. Steganography is basically classified into three categories (Ramalingam et al., 2014a, b; Rajagopalan et al., 2014a-d; Thanikaiselvan et al., 2012a-c, 2013a, b, 2014). These are text steganography, image steganography and audio/video steganography. All the three of them have their own specialization and characteristics.

Over the past few years, there had been increasing steganography techniques that are greatly used to ingrain secret messages into multi-media objects. This is because that multimedia objects have high rate of superfluous information which provides a way to add large number of data by carrying out cinch and profound changes that preserve visceral content of the cover. This study effectively implies image steganography (Amirtharajan and Rayappan, 2012a-c; Janakiraman et al., 2012a, b, 2013, 2014a, b; Rajagopalan et al., 2014a-d).

In image steganography, the information is entirely hidden inside the images. There are various techniques present to perform this operation. The LSB substitution is one of the most simple and straight forward techniques. Here, the message is ingrained into least significant bit plane hence it causes less degradation of the cover. The LSB based techniques stays to be an ambitious task for the steg-analyst to differentiate the cover and stego images, given small changes have been made.