Improved Steganography Scheme based on Fractal Set
Mohammad Alia1 and Khaled Suwais2
1Faculty
of Sciences and Information Technology, Al-Zaytoonah University of Jordan,
Jordan
2Faculty
of Computer Studies, Arab Open University, Saudi Arabia
Abstract: Steganography is the art of hiding secret data inside
digital multimedia such as image, audio, text and video. It plays a significant
role in current trends for providing secure communication and guarantees accessibility
of secret information by authorised parties only. The Least-Significant Bit (LSB)
approach is one of the important schemes in steganography. The majority of
LSB-based schemes suffer from several problems due to distortion in a limited
payload capacity for stego-image. In this paper, we have presented an
alternative steganographic scheme that does not rely on cover images as in
existing schemes. Instead, the image which includes the secure hidden data is
generated as an image of a curve. This curve is resulted from a series of
computation that is carried out over the mathematical chaotic fractal sets. The new scheme aims at improving the data
concealing capacity, since it achieves limitless concealing capacity and
disposes of the likelihood of the attackers to realise any secret information
from the resulted stego-image. From the security side, the proposed scheme
enhances the level of security as the scheme depends on the exact matching
between secret information and the generated fractal (Mandelbrot-Julia) values.
Accordingly, a key stream is created based on these matches. The
proposed scheme is evaluated and tested successfully from different
perspectives.
Keywords: Steganography, data hiding, security, Julia
set, Mandelbrot set, and fractal set.
Received July 10, 2017;
accepted December 17, 2017
https://doi.org/10.34028/iajit/17/1/15