Secret Key-Based Image Steganography in Spatial Domain

Day by day, the requirement for secure communication among users is rising in a digital world, to protect the message from the undesirable users. Steganography is a methodology that satisfies the user's necessity of secure communication by inserting a message into different formats. This paper proposes a secret key-based image steganography to secure the message by concealing the grayscale image inside a cover image. The proposed technique shares the 20 characters long secret key between two clients where the initial eight characters of a secret key are utilized for bit permutation of characters and pixels while the last 12 characters of secret key decide the encryption keys and position of pixels of a grayscale image into the cover. The grayscale image undergoes operation such as encryption and chaotic baker followed by its hiding in a cover to form a stego image. The execution of the proposed strategy is performed on Matlab 2018. It shows that the proposed approach manages to store the maximum message of size 16 KB into the cover of size 256 x 256. The image quality of stego images has been evaluated using PSNR, MSE. For a full payload of 16 KB, PSNR is around 51 dB to 53 dB which is greater than satisfactory PSNR.