COMSATS University Islamabad,

Park Road, Chak Shahzad, Islamabad Pakistan

Project Proposal
(SCOPE DOCUMENT)

For

Image Steganography with 3 Way Encryption

Version 1.0

By
M. Faraz Haider CIIT/SP18-BCS-103/ISB
M. Farhan Shaukat CIIT/SP18-BCS-104/ISB

Supervisor
Mr. Tehseen Riaz Abbasi

Submission Date: (31-October-2019)

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (2018- )

Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

SCOPE DOCUMENT REVSION HISTORY

No. Comment Action

Supervisor Signature

Date:
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

Table of Contents
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 4
2 Problem Statement ................................................................................................................... 5
3 Problem Solution for Proposed System ................................................................................... 6
4 Related System Analysis/Literature Review ........................................................................... 6
5 Advantages/Benefit of Proposed System ................................................................................ 7
6 Scope ....................................................................................................................................... 7
7 Modules ................................................................................................................................... 7
7.1 Module 1: Registration ..................................................................................................... 7
7.2 Module 2: Login ............................................................................................................... 7
7.3 Module 3: Encryption....................................................................................................... 7
7.4 Module 4: Decryption ...................................................................................................... 7
7.5 Module 5: Sharing ............................................................................................................ 7
8 System Limitation/Constraints ................................................................................................ 8
9 Software Process Methodology ............................................................................................... 8
10 Design Methodology............................................................................................................ 8
11 Tool and Technologies ......................................................................................................... 8
12 Project Stake Holders and Roles .......................................................................................... 9
13 Team Members Individual Tasks/Work Division................................................................ 9
14 Data Gathering Approach .................................................................................................... 9
15 Concepts ............................................................................................................................... 9
15.1 Android Development ...................................................................................................... 9
15.2 Web Development .......................................................................................................... 10
15.3 Desktop Application development ................................................................................. 10
16 Gantt chart .......................................................................................................................... 10
17 Mockups ............................................................................................................................. 10
18 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 13
19 References .......................................................................................................................... 13

3
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

Project Category:

A-Desktop Application B- Web Application C-Problem Solving and AI E- Smartphone

Application H- Image Processing

Abstract
Steganography is the process of hiding the fact that communication is taking place, by hiding
information in other information. Many different types of carrier file formats can be used, but
digital images are most widely used because of their frequency on the internet. For the purpose
of hiding secret information in digital images, there are a number of steganography techniques
some are more complex than others and all of them have respective strong and weak points.
Different applications would need absolute invisibility of the secret information, while others
require a large secret message to be hidden.

This scope document intends to give an overview of image steganography, its uses and
techniques to be used in the system. This document also tries to find out the requirements of a
good steganography algorithm and also briefly reflects about steganographic techniques which
are more suitable for which applications.

1 Introduction

Steganography has become more important as more and more people have joined the
cyberspace revolution. Steganography is the process of hiding information in ways that
prevent the detection of hidden messages. Steganography includes a sequence of secret
communication methods that hide the message from being seen or discovered.

4
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

Due to advancements in ICT, most of information is stored in electronic ways, because of

which the security of information has become a fundamental issue. Other than cryptography,
steganography can be used to secure information. In cryptography, the message or encrypted
message is stored in a digital mean before passing it through the network, thus the existence
of the message is not known. Besides hiding data for confidential purposes, this approach of
information hiding can be extended to copyright protection for different types of digital
media such as: audio, video and images.
The growing possibilities of modern communications require some special means of security
especially on a computer network. Network security is becoming more and more important
as the amount of data being exchanged on the internet increases. Thus, the confidentiality and
data integrity are required to safeguard against unauthorized access and use. This has resulted
in massive amount of growth in the field of information hiding. Information hiding is a rising
research area, which surrounds itself with applications such as copyright protection for
digital media, watermarking, fingerprinting, and steganography.
Steganography hides the secret message within the host data set and makes the presence
unnoticeable and is to be reliably communicated to a receiver. The host data set is purposely
corrupted, but in a secret way, which is designed to be invisible to an information view. The
other objective of steganography is to avoid suspicion towards the existence of a hidden
message in the data set. This information hiding technique has recently became very
important in a number of application fields.
Steganography is used in some cases when encryption is not permitted. Or, in more common
situations, steganography is used in accordance with encryption. An encrypted can also hide
information using steganography, so even if the encrypted file is deciphered, the hidden
message cannot be seen.

2 Problem Statement

One of the reasons that hackers can be successful is that the most of the information they
acquire from a system is in a form that they can read and contemplate. Intruders can reveal
the information to others, change it to misrepresent an individual or organization, or use it to
launch an attack.

5
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

3 Problem Solution for Proposed System

One solution to the problem is that through the use of Image steganography. Steganography
is a process of hiding information in digital media. The system will use image files as digital
media. As compared to cryptography, it is not used to keep others from knowing the secret
information but it is used to keep others from believing that the hidden information doesn’t
even exists. The objective of image steganography is secret communication. So, a main
requirement of this steganography system is that the secret message carried by stego-media
should not be visible to human beings.
This project has following objectives:
 To product security tool based on image steganography techniques.
 To explore different techniques of hiding data using encryption module of this
system.
 To extract techniques of getting secret data using decryption module of this system.

4 Related System Analysis/Literature Review

Table 1 Related System Analysis with proposed project solution
Application Name Weakness Proposed Project Solution

QuickStego  Slow and not durable.  File steganography also

 Lacks Human supported.
interaction.  More User friendly.
 QuickStego does not  Better speed.
ENCRYPT the secret
text message.
 QuickStego will not let
you hide files in images.

Steghide  Command line interface  Graphical user Interface

so you need to learn the which makes it easier to
commands. use.
Crypture  Command Line interface.  GUI
 Image file should be 8  No restrictions on file size.
times larger than data
file.

6
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

5 Advantages/Benefit of Proposed System

The proposed system has the following advantages/benefits:

 Fast, easy and accurate way of sending covert data.

 User friendly process to encrypt and decrypt text on an image.
 Can be added on any image type of image which makes it like other images.

6 Scope
This system will be developed for hiding covert information in any image file. The scope of
this project is an implementation of steganography techniques for hiding information which
includes any type of image files and the path where the user wants to save Image and the
decrypted file.

7 Modules
The system consists of five modules:

Module 1: Registration
To access the core system, the user will first need to register themselves by providing
required details. The user will set his user name and provide a password and confirm
password for successful registration.

Module 2: Login
After registration, the user can log in to the system. For login, the user will provide his/her
username and password.

Module 3: Encryption
In this module the user will encrypt the secret message into an image file. First, the user
will select the algorithm such as DES (Data Encryption Standard), AES (Advanced
Encryption Standard) or LSB (Least Significant Bit) for encrypting data into the image
file. Then, the user selects an image for sending a secret message which will be encrypted
into the file.

Module 4: Decryption
In this module, the user will decrypt the given image file using a given code to access the
shared message. The user will first enter the transaction id, then the type of encryption and
at last the encryption key to decode the message.

Module 5: Sharing
After hiding the text with the encryption module, the user saves the image and then sends
it to the other party i.e. Receiver, who will be able to decrypt the message using the
7
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

decryption module of the system. The user will first enter the encryption key, then the
message to be encrypted and at last the user id of the person to share with.

8 System Limitation/Constraints
The proposed system has a presumption that both the sender and receiver must have shared
some secret information before imprisonment. A pure steganography technique means that
there is no prior information shared by two communication parties.

9 Software Process Methodology

For the proposed project, an incremental software process model will be used for the
development. It is more convenient and effective for the proposed system development to
use an incremental approach the main functionalities would be done first like the encryption
module while other functionalities would be done later.

10 Design Methodology
Object oriented design methodology is used in the development of the system because object
oriented design will be easier to manage for this system. The code created with this method
will easier to use and can be reused as well.

11 Tool and Technologies

Table2 Tools and Technologies for Proposed Project
Tools Version Rationale
MS Visual Studio 2017 IDE
Android Studio 2019 IDE
Tools Eclipse 2019 IDE
And Adobe Photoshop CSC 6 Design Work
Technologies MS Word 2015 Documentation
Oracle Sql Developer 2019 DBMS
MS Power Point 2015 Presentation
Pencil 2.0.5 Mock-ups Creation
Technology Version Rationale
C# 6.0 Programming language
Java SE 8 Programming language
Python 3.7.0 Programming language
React.js 16.11 Framework

8
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

12 Project Stake Holders and Roles

Table 3 Project Stakeholders for Proposed Project
Project COMSATS University, Islamabad.
Sponsor

Stakeholder  Student’s names: M. Faraz Haider (SP18-BCS-103).

M. Farhan Shaukat (SP18-BCS-104).
 Project Supervisor Name: Mr. Tehseen Riaz Abbasi

13 Team Members Individual Tasks/Work Division

Table 4 Team Member Work Division for Proposed Project
Student Name Student Registration Number Responsibility/ Modules
M. Faraz Haider SP18-BCS-103 Module2 : Login
Module3: Encryption.
Module5 : Sharing

M. Farhan Shaukat SP18-BCS-104 Module1 : Registration

Module4: Decryption.

14 Data Gathering Approach

The project data gathering approach has been done after thoroughly going through multiple
research, scholarly article and interviews from the project domain related people and
concluded that the project is productive and has multiple uses in the multitude situations
and purposes.

15 Concepts
Following are the concepts that we will learn from the project:

Android Development
An android application will be built of this system which will be made in Android studio.

9
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

Web Development
This system will also be implemented on web level using react.js at frontend level and java
at the backend level.

Desktop Application development

This system will also have a desktop application of its own which will be built in java.

16 Gantt chart

17 Mockups

10
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

11
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

12
Scope Document for < Image Steganography With 3 Way Encryption >

18 Conclusion
Steganography is a really interesting subject and outside of the mainstream cryptography and
system administration that most of us deal with day after day. Steganography can be used for
hidden communication. We have explored the limits of steganography theory and practice. We
printed out the enhancement of the image steganography system using LSB approach to
provide a means of secure communication. A stego-key has been applied to the system during
embedment of the message into the cover image. This steganography application software
provided for the purpose to how to use any type of image formats to hiding any type of files
inside their. The master work of this application is in supporting any type of pictures without
need to convert to bitmap, and lower limitation on file size to hide, because of using maximum
memory space in pictures to hide the file. Since ancient times, man has found a desire in the
ability to communicate covertly. The recent explosion of research in watermarking to protect
intellectual property is evidence that steganography is not just limited to military or espionage
applications. Steganography, like cryptography, will play an increasing role in the future of
secure communication in the “digital world”.

19 References
 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6850714&newsearch=true&qu
eryText=image%20steganography
 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7226122&newsearch=true&qu
eryText=image%20steganography
 http://www.google.com
 http://www.wikipedia.org

13