SEBS - Secure Emoticons Based Steganography

Be it a commercial or military undertaking, the decisive factor of one's success in the respective arena is to have uninterrupted operation-critical activities. On account of large scale reliance on information technology, affording maximum protection to data has become extremely essential to manage fluctuating business trends. By and large, Cryptographic Services are being employed to secure the data. Secure encryption, indeed, is a remedy against eavesdropping of sensitive information but its perceptibility - as something being gibberish - is sufficient enough to seek immediate attention of an onlooker which raises suspicion of some behind the scene activity. Hence, there felt a serious need to hide sensitive data in a manner such that its existence shall remain unknown to the unauthorized person. To address the perceptibility concern, various image based digital steganographic schemes have been introduced. However, it is observed that existing image-based digital steganographic schemes do not take into consideration the worst case scenario that the enemy can also have the possession of original cover. To overcome this shortcoming, this paper presents a novel steganographic scheme which is effective against known-cover attack. Furthermore, it provides greater cryptographic security by adhering to Kerckhoff's principal and successfully protects private or classified information, whether at rest or in transit. Our steganographic scheme provides a method to protect information by hiding it behind emoticons - a popular means of conversation in mobile communication and social media these days. A single emoticon in our scheme can conceal up to 8 bits of secret information. This scheme affords robustness via unique set of emoticons. We present twofold security via encryption and steganography. Hence, this scheme is most unlikely to raise suspicion of a hidden message even if original cover is known to the adversary. The proposed scheme is equally suitable for Chat, IM, SMS and email.