Personal Social Network Profile Authentication through Image Steganography

Abstract

In the era of digital communication and social networking, the authenticity and integrity of personal social network profiles have become crucial for establishing trust and ensuring secure interactions. Existing methods often suffer from vulnerabilities like password theft, identity impersonation, and data breaches. To overcome these challenges, the paper introduces a new steganography method as a robust solution, leveraging the concept of hiding information within a seemingly innocent digital cover image. The proposed methodology involves imperceptible authentication and embedding profile information within a profile image or any other uploaded pictures in a profile’s timeline. This scheme is developed using a shell matrix, DNA encoding and absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC) compression. A shell matrix is used for concealing the private information and AMBTC compression is applied to compress large data files into smaller ones, which can speed up the network transmission of compressed code. By exploiting the redundancy in image data, the authentication data are embedded in a manner that is indistinguishable to human observers. To estimate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, wide experiments were conducted using real-world social network profiles. The results demonstrate the ability of the proposed technique to successfully embed and extract authentication data while maintaining the profile photo’s visual appearance.

Keywords

• shell matrix
• covert communication
• AMBTC compression
• multimedia security
• social media security