International Journal of Science, Engineering and Technology Research (IJSETR)
Volume 3, Issue5, May 2014
Secured Data Hiding System using Video
Steganography
Zun Moe Oo1, Su Wai Phyo2
Department of Information Technology
Abstract—Computer technology and the Internet have made a
breakthrough in the existence of data communication. This has
opened a whole new way of implementing steganography to
ensure secure data transfer. Steganography is the fine art of
hiding the information. Hiding the message in the carrier file
enables the deniability of the existence of any message at all.
The proposed system designs a stego machine to develop a
steganographic application to hide data containing text in a
computer video file and to retrieve the hidden information. This
can be designed by embedding text file in a video file in such a
way that the video does not lose its functionality using Least
Significant Bit (LSB) modification method. This method applies
imperceptible modifications. This work proposes data security
system using LSB based steganography and digital envelope. To
create the digital envelope, RC4 and RSA algorithm are
effectively combined in the proposed system. The system is
implemented by C# programming language.
Keywords- - Cryptography, Steganography, Least Significant
Bit (LSB), RC4 stream cipher, Rivest-Sharmir-Adleman (RSA)
Algorithm
I. INTRODUCTION
igital communication has become an essential part of
infrastructure nowadays, a lot of applications are
Internet-based and in some cases it is desired that
communication be made secret. Consequently, the security of
information has become a fundamental issue, many of the
techniques are available to achieve this goal some of them are
the Encryption and the steganography techniques. Using
cryptography, the information is transformed into some other
gibberish form and then the encrypted information is
transmitted. Steganography is a process that involves hiding a
message in an appropriate carrier for example an image or an
audio file. The carrier can then be sent to a receiver without
anyone else knowing that it contains a hidden message [1].
Steganography is mostly used on computers with digital data
being the carriers and networks being the high speed delivery
channels. Modern steganography is generally understood to
deal with electronic media rather than physical objects and
texts. This makes sense for a number of reasons. First of all,
because the size of the information is generally (necessarily)
quite small compared to the size of the data in which it must
be hidden (the cover file), electronic media are much easier to
manipulate in order to hide data and extract messages.
Secondly, extraction itself can be automated when the data is
electronic, since computers can efficiently manipulate the
data and execute the algorithms necessary to retrieve the
messages. Electronic data also often includes redundant,
unnecessary, and unnoticed data spaces which can be
manipulated in order to hide messages [1].
D
II.FRAMEWORK OF STEGANOGRAPHY MODEL
In general, the basic framework of the steganography
model consists of two main processes, namely the embedding
process and the extracting process. The main function of the
embedding process is to hide the secret message, called
embedded message, in a given cover, called cover-file. In
hidden communication techniques, the cover file is no more
than an innocent (unrelated to the embedded message) piece
of information that is used to hide the secret information.
A secret key, called stego-key is used in the embedding
process such that it makes the embedded message
computationally infeasible to extract without possessing this
key. The output of the embedding process is called stego-file,
which is the original file holding the hidden secret message.
This output becomes, at the other end, the input of the
extracting process, in which the embedded message is
extracted from the stego file to complete the hidden
communication process. Since the stego-key is used in the
embedding process, it needs to be used in the extracting
process [3].
III. VIDEO STEGANOGRAPHY AND SECURITY
Data Hiding is the process of secretly embedding information
inside a data source without changing its perceptual quality.
Data Hiding is the art and science of writing hidden messages
in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended
recipient even realizes there is a hidden message. Generally,
in Data Hiding, the actual information is not maintained in its
original format and thereby it is converted into an alternative
equivalent multimedia file like image, video or audio which
in turn is being hidden within another object. This apparent
message is sent through the network to the recipient, where
the actual message is separated from it. The requirements of
any data hiding system can be categorized into security,
capacity and robustness. All these factors are inversely
proportional to each other creating the so called data hiding
dilemma. The focus of this paper aims at maximizing the first
two factors of data hiding i.e. security and capacity. The
proposed scheme is a data-hiding method that uses high
resolution digital video as a cover signal. The proposed
recipient need only process the required steps in order to
reveal the message; otherwise the existence of the hidden
information is virtually undetectable. The proposed scheme
provides the ability to hide a significant quality of
information making it different from typical data hiding
mechanisms because this paper is focused on text-in-video.
The purpose of hiding such information depends on the
application and the needs of the owner/user of the digital
media. Data hiding requirements include the following:
a. Imperceptibility- The video with data and original
data source should be perceptually identical.
1
All Rights Reserved © 2014 IJSETR
International Journal of Science, Engineering and Technology Research (IJSETR)
Volume 3, Issue5,Mayy 2014
b.
Robustness- The embedded data should survive any
processing operation the host signal goes through
and preserve its fidelity.
c. Capacity-Maximize data embedding payload.
d. Security- Security is in the key.
Data Hiding is the different concept than cryptography,
but uses some of its basic principles [4]. In this system, RC4
encryption algorithm, RSA public key algorithm and LSB
insertion techniques are used.
simply iterate 256 times the following actions after
initializing i and j to 0:
 compute j = j + S[i] + key[i mod key length]

swap S[i] and S[j]

increment i
IV. SYMMETRIC KEY CRYPTOGRAPHY
With symmetric key cryptography, a single key is used for
both encryption and decryption. As shown in Figure 1. Secret
key cryptography schemes are generally categorized as being
either stream ciphers or block ciphers. Stream ciphers operate
on a single bit (byte or computer word) at a time and block
cipher encrypts one block of data at a time using the same key
on each block.
Once i has reached 256 (the 256 iterations were
completed), the S array has been properly initialized.
Now that the S array is generated, it is used in the next step of
the RC4 algorithm to generate the keystream.
Figure 1. Symmetirc key crypto system
The sender uses the key to encrypt the plaintext and sends
the cipher text to the receiver. The receiver applies the same
key to decrypt the message and recover the plaintext.
Because a single key is used for both functions, secret key
cryptography is also called symmetric encryption. This
system will use RC4 stream cipher algorithm and RSA public
key algorithm.
A. RC4 Algorithm
RC4 like as a streaming cipher encrypts plaintext one byte at
a time, but also can be designed to encrypt one bit a time or
even units larger than a byte at a time. In this structure a key
is input to a pseudorandom bit generator that produces a
stream of 8-bit numbers that are supposed to be truly random,
the pseudorandom stream can’t be predicted without
knowledge of the input key. The output of the generator is
called a key stream .It is combined one byte a time with the
plain text stream using the bitwise exclusive-OR (XOR)
operation [6].
RC4 is the most widely deployed commercial stream cipher,
having applications in network protocols such as SSL, WEP,
WPA and in Microsoft Windows, Apple OCE, Secure SQL
etc. It was designed in 1987 by Ron Rivest for RSA Data
Security. The cipher consists of two major components, the
Key Scheduling Algorithm (KSA) and the Pseudo-Random
Generation Algorithm (PRGA) [7].
1) Key Scheduling Algorithm (KSA): As explained
before, the key-scheduling algorithm is used to generate the
permutation array. The first step of this algorithm consist in
initializing the S table with the identity permutation: the
values in the array are equal to their index. Once the S array is
initialized, the next step consists in shuffling the array using
the key to make it a permutation array [2]. To do so, one
2) Stream Generation: This step of the algorithm
consists in generating a keystream of the size of the message
to encrypt. This algorithm enables us to generate a keystream
of any size. To do so, first initialize the two indexes to 0 and
we then start the generation of the keystream one byte at a
time until we reached the size of the message to encrypt. For
each new byte to compute, the following actions will do [2]:
 Compute new value of i and j:
i := (i + 1) % 256
j := (j + S[i]) % 256
 Swap S[i] and S[j] to have a dynamic state (it makes
it obviously harder to crack than if the state was
computed only once and use for the generation of
the whole keystream)
 Retrieve the next byte of the keystream from the S
array at the index
S[i]+S[j]% 256
3) Encryption and Decryption of RC4: Once the
keystream has been generated, the encryption of the
plaintext is really simple: it simply consists of a XOR
between the plaintext and the keystream. As for the
decryption, it is as simple as the encryption, the ciphertext
with the keystream.
V.PUBLIC KEY CRYPTOGRAPHY
Public-key cryptography is also known as asymmetric-key
cryptography, to distinguish it from the symmetric-key
cryptography. Encryption and decryption are carried out
2
All Rights Reserved © 2014 IJSETR
International Journal of Science, Engineering and Technology Research (IJSETR)
Volume 3, Issue5, May 2014
using two different keys. The two keys in such a key pair are
referred to as the public key and the private key.
(10100110
(11010010
11000100
10101101
00001100)
01100011)
When the letter A, which binary representation is 01000001
and is embedded into the least significant bits of this part of
the image, the resulting grid is as follows:
Figure 2 . Public Key Cryptography
A. RSA Public Key Algorithm
Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman developed the
algorithm and gave the implementation details in the year
1978. Since then, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) scheme it
is considered as the only widely accepted and implemented
general-purpose approach to public-key encryption [5]. RSA
algorithm is a block cipher technique in which plain text and
ciphertext are integers between ‘0’ and ‘n-1’ from some ‘n’.
In RSA algorithm encryption and decryption are of following
form, for some plain text M and cipher text C:
C = Me mod n
M = Cd mod n
Both sender and receiver must know the value of ‘n’.
The sender knows the value of ‘e’ and only receiver knows
the value of‘d’. Thus, this is a public-key encryption
algorithm with a public key of KU= {e, n} and private key of
KR={d, n}. For the algorithm to be satisfactory for
public-key encryption, the following requirement must be
met
1. It is possible to find values of e, d, n such that M^ed =
M mod n for all M<n.
2. It is relatively easy to calculate M^e and C^d for all
values of M<n.
3. It is infeasible to determine d given e and n.
The key generation process is as follows
 Select p and q (p and q are prime numbers)
 Calculate n = p x q
 Calculate ϕ (n) = (p-1) x (q-1)
 Select integer e gcd(ϕ (n),e)=1; 1<e< ϕ (n); e and ϕ
(n) are relative prime
 Calculate d where d = e-1 mod ϕ (n)
 Public key KU = {e,n}
 Private key KR = {d,n}
VI.LEAST SIGNIFICANT BIT INSERTION METHOD
Least Significant Bit (LSB) insertion is a common, simple
approach to embedding information in a cover video. Video
is converted into a number of frames, and then convert each
frame into an image. After that, the Least Significant Bit of
some or all of the bytes inside an image is changed to a bit of
each of the Red, Green and Blue color components can be
used, since they are each represented by a byte. In other
words one can store 3 bit in each pixel. An 800*600 pixel
image can store a total amount of 1,440,000 bits or 180,000
bytes of embedded data. For example a grid for 3 pixels of a
24 bit image can be as follows:
(00101101 00011100 11011100)
(00101100 00011101 11011100)
(10100110 11000100 00001100)
(11010010 10101101 01100011)
Although the letter was embedded into the first 8 bytes of the
grid, only the 2 highlighted bits need to be changed according
to the embedded message. On average only half of the bit in
an image will need to be modified to hide a secret message
using the maximum cover size.
This paper is designed to embed the text into the video
signal and to convert the text data into the binary format.
Binary conversions is done by taking the ASCII value of the
character and converting those ASCII values into binary
format and takes the binary representation of samples of
cover signal and insert the binary representation of text into
that cover signal.
The LSB bits of video signals are substituted by the binary
bits of data and this encoded signal is called stego signal is
ready for transmission. For the steganography the important
video format is Audio Video Interleave (AVI). The message
to hide is converted into ASCII and then converted into its
binary representation with each word consist of 8 bits. These
bits are substituted in the Least Significant Bits of binary
representation of each image ample [8].
VII. AUDIO VIDEO INTERLEAF (AVI) FORMAT
AVI means Audio Video Interleave, is a multimedia
container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992
as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can
contain both audio and video data in a file container that
allows synchronous audio-with-video playback. Like the
DVD video format, AVI files support multiple streaming
audio and video, although these features are seldom used.
The AVI file type is primarily associated with 'Audio Video
Interleave File'. Recent files might be compressed with one or
another codecs (like DivX and XviD). It can also be seen with
VLC Player, MPlayer and KMPlayer.
VIII. PROPOSED SYSTEM DESIGN
The proposed system design involves two parts sender side
and receiver side. In the sender side (Figure 3), the sender
firstly encrypts the message using RC4 stream cipher. And
then the RC4 key is encrypted using RSA public key
cryptosystem with receiver public key. Finally the encrypted
message and RC4 key are embedded into the AVI video
using LSB based video stegnography and then sent to the
receiver.
Figure 3. Encryption process of system design
3
All Rights Reserved © 2014 IJSETR
International Journal of Science, Engineering and Technology Research (IJSETR)
Volume 3, Issue5,Mayy 2014
In the receiver side (Figure 4), firstly it is extracted the
encrypted message and RC4 key from the AVI video file.
And then the RC4 key is recovered by using RSA public key
cryptosystem and receiver’s private key. After that the
receiver decrypts the message with RC4 key to recover the
original message.
Figure 4. Decryption Process of System Design
IX. TEST AND RESULT
The following results are generated by implementing the
proposed system. In this paper, the results are displayed a
series of interface by choosing manuscript.
Figure 7. Message and Key Encryption with RC4 and RSA
Algorithm
The embedding processing is shown in Figure 8.
Figure 5. Welcome Form
Figure 8. Hiding Message into Cover AVI File
Firstly, the user can see the welcome form as main
interface and can continue RSA Key Generation form by
choosing keys on the menu and keys are auto generated by
pressing Generate button and can save the public and private
keys using Save buttons as shown in figure 6.
X. CONCLUSION
Many data from where such as military, hospital, bank and
business need security while communicating between people
and activities. Symmetric encryption algorithms can solve
the problems of the information security with the security
keys. Symmetric key algorithms are faster and easier to be
implemented than the asymmetric key algorithms. This
system proves which algorithm is appropriate for each data
type.
XI.REFERENCES
Figure 6. RSA Key Generation Form
As figure, the user can choose sender side by clicking
Sender on the menu and the encryption processes are
appeared as in Figure 7.
[1] T. Morkel, J.H.P. Eloff and M.S. Olivier, “An Overview of Image
Steganography”, in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual
Information Security South Africa Conference (ISSA2005), Sandton,
South Africa, June/July 2005.
[2] Quentin Galvane, Baptiste Uzel, “Cryptography-RC4 Alogrithm”,
February 18,2012.
[3] A. H. Ouda and M. R. El-Sakka, “A Step Towards Practical
Steganography Systems”, Computer Science Department,
University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, ICIAR
2005, LNCS 3656, pp. 1158 – 1166, 2005.
[4] Arup Kumar Bhaumik, Minkyu Choi, Rosslin J.Robles and Maricel
O.Ba Litanas, “Data Hiding in Video”,Vol.2, No.2, June 2009.
[5] Bhaskar Bora, “Implementation of RSA Algorithm”, March
2,2003,Bangalore, India.
[6] Alaa M.Riad, A., Elminir K.Hamdy, M.,Taha R.Ibrahim,
“EVALUATION OF THE RC4 ALGORITHM AS A SOLUTION
FOR CONVERGE NETWORKS”,Vol.60,No.3,2009,155-160.
4
All Rights Reserved © 2014 IJSETR
International Journal of Science, Engineering and Technology Research (IJSETR)
Volume 3, Issue5, May 2014
[7] Souuav Sen Gupta, S., Gowtam Paul, S., “(Non-) Random Sequences
from (Non-) Random Permutations-Analysis of RC4 Stream Cipher”,
FSE, SAC, 2011.
[8] MrithaRamalingam, “Stegomachine – Video Steganography using
Modified LSB Algorithm”, 2011
[9] http://www.winxdvd.com/resource/avi.htm.
Authors
First Author – Zun Moe Oo,zunmoechaw@gmail.com
Second Author- Su Wai Phyo,
suwaiphyo@gmail.com
5
All Rights Reserved © 2014 IJSETR