Abstract
Background: Over recent years, the security of the publicly available audio, video and text data has become a big challenge, i.e., social media communication; hence the author presents an exceedingly secure communication system to hide the data from an attentive adversary.
Objective: The study aims to design and analyze a novel algorithm to be implemented for message transmission using multi-image LSB steganography and crucial variable-length cryptography. Encoder, decoder and social media as a channel are the main parts of the study.
Methods: Various computer techniques like cryptography and steganography with video handling are used to perform the proposed work. The main objective of this work is to implement the raw video as the cover on the QR code image. This image is to be transmitted as information by enshrouding it in the raw footage. Additionally, encryption of QR code image using VLMKG (Variable Length Mixed key Generation) cryptography enhances the reliability of work. The variablelength Key is generated separately to implement the cryptography. Multi-image LSB steganography is imposed with one-bit replacement in the spatial domain. Wavelet Transform (Daubechies family) is applied for denoising, which enhances the accuracy of the received data.
Results: The proposed work provides a secure way to transmit any information in the form of QR code image successfully. It is verified with the help of five QR Code images and three raw video groupings.
Conclusion: Implementation of LSB steganography, variable-length key cryptography and MATLAB usage had superbly extracted the image features; calculations and the consequences were observed to be palatable.
Keywords: Covert communication, LSB steganography, cryptography, QR Code, Daubechies wavelet, feature extraction.
Graphical Abstract