One time pad for enhanced steganographic security using least significant bitwith spiral pattern

Abstract

Data is an important commodity in today’s digital era. Therefore,data needs to get adequate security to prevent misuse. A common data security practice in  the  transmission  of  information  is  cryptography.  Another  approach  is steganography,  which  hides  secret  messages  in  other  media  that  are  not confidential  and  can  be  accessed  by  the  public.  In  this  study,  the  spiral pattern  is  used  for  data  placement  using  the least  significant  bit (LSB)method.  Modifications  were  made  to  the  2-bits  LSB  to  increase  the  data capacity  that  can  be  hidden.  In  order  to  increase  security,  thedata  is  first converted into a datastream using random numbers as one time pad (OTP). exclusive-OR (XOR)operation is performed on datastreamand OTP to get encrypted data to be hidden. The results showed that the image quality of the steganography  results  at  a  capacity  close  to  100%  was  still  fairly  good,  as indicated  by  a peak  signal-to-noise  ratio (PSNR)value  greater  than  46dB. Visually, the steganographic image does not look different from the original one.  Likewise,  the  use  of  random  numbers  as  OTP  succeeded  in  changing the  hidden  data  significantly,  as  indicated  by the  avalanche  effect  value above 50%.