Image and audio steganography based on indirect LSB

Hiding the presence of data during communication has become a pressing concern in this overly digitalized world as a consequence of illegitimate access. These concerns have led to cryptography and steganography techniques as methods for securing data. This paper presents a modified information hiding technique based on an indirect least significant bit. Instead of saving each bit of the secret message in the least significant bit (LSB) of the cover media, each bit of the secret message is compared to a mask bit in the cover media. The result is saved in the cover media's LSB. In this paper, two steganography schemas are designed in which the cover media are image and audio, while the secret message is a text file. A simple encryption technique is used to transform the secret message into an unreadable format before the hiding process begins. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves promising performance.