Image steganography: hiding short audio messages withidin digital images

Abstract

It is sometimes not enough to keep the contents of a message secret, it may also be necessary to keep the existence of the message secret. The technique used to implement this, is called steganography and it is the process of hiding one medium of communication within another. Many different carrier file formats (text, sound or image) can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency on the Internet. Essentially, the information-hiding process in a steganographic system starts by identifying a cover meduim's redundant bits (those that can be modified without destroying that medium's integrity). The embedding process creates a stego medium by replacing these redundant bits with data from the hidden message. This paper will discuss the possibility of hiding short audio messages inside a digital image. The proposed approach encrypts the audio message before hiding it in image file. The process of extracting the audio message from stego-image will be discussed as well

Keywords

• steganography
• cryptography
• audio message
• image hiding
• least-significant bit (lsb) method