A Novel Secure Communication Protocol Combining Steganography and Cryptography

In this paper, a new secure communication protocol that combines steganography and cryptography techniques organically is proposed. It is based on the LSB matching method and the well-developed Boolean functions in stream ciphers. The cover media employed focuses on grayscale images, and the Boolean function is used for encryption and controlling the pseudo-random increment or decrement of LSB. Unlike the existing methods of doing encrypting and hiding separately, this protocol is one-stop, accomplishing them all at once. Therefore, it needs less computation than the existing methods do while maintaining high secure quality. To our knowledge, this is the first secure protocol of this kind. And this method not only is easy to be implemented, but also has almost optimal embedding ratio, what's more, it is highly robust to resist regular steganalysis, such as RS analysis, GPC analysis,chi(2)-analysis. (c) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of [CEIS 2011]