Steganography – An overview of Image Steganography using

LSB Methodology
S. Kaviseshan1, M. Thushitharan
1
Faculty of Computing, Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology, Malabe; 2 Faculty of Computing, Sri Lanka Institute of Information
Technology, Malabe

ABSTRACT
Steganography is a new growing technology in cyber security to protect secret or sensitive information from malicious
users. Early days we used encryptions and decryptions to protect sensitive information. Now a days steganography is the
latest technology to hide information. We can hide the secret information in the non-secret or ordinary files. And this
secret message will be got in the destination. By using steganography without any idea, we can send the secret message to
the receiver. We can send the secret messages in normal files like word or excel files or we can attach our secret message
in picture, and we can send it to the destination, and he also can get the secret message from that image. We have
developed a steganography tool for Information Security Project module. By using this tool, we can hide the secret
message within the “.png” type digital images and we can send that image with secret message, and we can use this tool
and we can separately find the secret message by using that tool. To hide secret message inside the image we use a function
call Encode and we have used a function call Decode to get the secret message from the image in that tool. When we
decode the secret message from the image it will show the base 64 encoded form and we can use online decode tools and
we can get the original form and this tool will run on both Linux and Windows environments.

INDEX TERMS:
Steganography, encryption, decryption, encode, decode, base64, security, LSB, Pixel, value, binary.

1. INTRODUCTION
Now a days cyber security is the most talking topic in the
world. And Information is the most valuable asset in
everywhere. To protect information from cyber threats,
cyber security specialists are working on it. The basic of
information protection is came from the encryptions and
decryptions. Here we changed our clear text to cipher text
(encrypted text) by using encryption key then send it to the
receiver and then they will decrypt the cipher text by using
the key. This methodology developed and now it is in its new
evolution that is Steganography.
Steganography is a new technology to transfer or hide
secret message inside the non-secret files or ordinary files. By
hiding secret or sensitive information in non-secret or
ordinary file attackers or others do not get doubt, or they do
not get any idea of it. We can send our secret message by
using this steganography technology. For the ordinary file we
can use a simple picture or images or video file or audio file.
We hide the secret message, and we can send the picture to
the particular person and that person can get the secret
message from that image. By using steganography tools and
we can hide the secret message in the ordinary files and send
to the receiver and receiver can get the secret message from
that steganography tools. Cryptography and steganography
are different functions and when we combined both
Cryptography and steganography it will give more security
and protection for sending secret message than using only
steganography and using Cryptography alone.
To develop this Steganography tool, we have use python
language and Linux operating System Environment and later
on it we have applied it in Windows environments, and it
succussed in Windows environment also. Now this tool will
work on both Linux and Windows environment. By using
this tool, we can hide the secret message in the particular
image or picture, and we can get the secr3et message in the
base 64 format by decode the picture. After getting the secret
message in the base 64 format we can decode the message by
using the online tools. After hide the message in the picture
in this tool and we can send the image through Email,
WhatsApp and Receiver can decode the secret message by
using this tool. When it comes to WhatsApp, we have to send
the image as document file only it will work. If we send as
image WhatsApp will remove the meta data from it because
of its security architecture. So, if we send in WhatsApp as
image, we can get the secret message. We can develop this
tool more secure in feature with cryptographical functions.
It will provide more security to the secret message
transactions.
A. Cryptography
Cryptography is the technology that is used to protect
information from the cyber-attacks. Basically, it changes the
information or data to another format, and it is help to
2 M. THUSHITHARAN, S. KAVISESHAN: STEGANOGRAPHY – AN OVERVIEW OF IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY USING LSB METHODOLOGY.
protect the Confidentiality, Integrity and the Reputation of
the information. Cryptography use many methods to protect
information like Symmetric encryption, Asymmetric
encryptions, Hashing and it using Steganography is the latest
methodology to protect secret information that used to hide
secret message in non-secret files or in the ordinary files.
B. Steganography
Steganography is the lattes trend in Cryptography which
needs to be hide secret information in the non-secret files or
ordinary files. And get the message back to the users. Here
we can embed secret message in the non-secret file, or it can
hide scripts and it can make harm to the receiver also.
The importance of steganography is to hide the secret
message in the normal or ordinary files or non-secret files.
This is a type of covert communication, and this can involve
with the use of medium of hiding secret message in files. And
this is not using a function of cryptography because it does
not change the form of the secret message which is hided
inside the files. And this is not using any keys or functions
for encryptions. This a data hiding, and it can be executed in
cleaver ways.
C. What is SDN
SDN is stands for Software-Defined Networking. SDN
is a network architectural technique that allows networks to
be smartly and centrally managed or programmed using
software applications.
D. IoT integrated SDN in Healthcare
The amount of IoMT systems and data transferred
through these networks is steadily expanding as IoT
applications become more prominent in the healthcare
business.
2. RESEARCH STATEMENT / OBJECTIVES
As a conclusion of this review, the viewer of this article
should have.
3. REVIEW OF PRODUCT - STEGURITY
A. Methodology – LSB Steganography
There are various methodologies available to hide
messages into images. All of them change some bits in the
image pixel values while hiding data directly. Least
Significant Bit (LSB) based steganography is one of the
simplest techniques that hides a secret message in the LSB
values of pixels without introducing many identifiable
distortions. Changes in the LSB value are unidentifiable for
human eyes.
B. Advantages of LSB Steganography
When we are using LSB Steganography, there are very
less changes of degradation of the image. More information
can be stored within the Image.
C. Disadvantages of LSB Steganography
Less Robust, there are high chance to loss the hidden data
with a minor image manipulation. Hidden message can be
easily destroyed by simple attacks.
D. How LSB Steganography works
We can describe a digital image as a finite set of digital
values, called pixels. Pixels are the smallest individual
element of an image, holding values that represent the
brightness of a given color at any specific point. So we can
think of an image as a matrix (or a two-dimensional array)
of pixels which contains a fixed number of rows and
columns. Least Significant Bit (LSB) is a technique in which
the last bit of each pixel is modified and replaced with the
secret message’s data bit.
Figure 1: Alignment of LSB and MSB values
the above image it is clear that, if we change MSB it will
have a larger impact on the final value but if we change the
LSB the impact on the final value is minimal, thus we use
least significant bit steganography.
Figure 2 : Digital image and Pixels Values
Each pixel contains three values which are Red, Green,
Blue. These of them are 8-bit values and they are range from
0 to 255. Let’s take an example of how this technique works,
suppose you want to hide the message “hi” into a 4x4 image
which has the following pixel values.
Using the ASCII Table, we can convert the secret message
into decimal values and then into binary: 0110100
0110101.Now, we iterate over the pixel values one by one,
after converting them to binary, we replace each least
significant bit with that message bits sequentially (e.g : 225 is
11100001, we replace the last bit, the bit in the right (1) with
the first data bit (0) and so on).This will only modify the pixel
values by +1 or -1 which is not noticeable at all. The resulting
pixel values after performing LSBs is as shown below:
3 M. THUSHITHARAN, S. KAVISESHAN: STEGANOGRAPHY – AN OVERVIEW OF IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY USING LSB METHODOLOGY.

o Platform - The Platform module is used to retrieve as

much possible information about the platform on which
the program is being currently executed.
So, this is how the LSB steganography works with the help of
modifying the LSB values of the image pixel values.

E. Novelty of the Product

Regular steganography tools are used to hide messages
and decode messages within a digital image. Our product will
have one more extra security functionality which is encoded
messages are only store within the image as base64 encoded
formatted message. When we decode the image, it will create This snippet of code is just to print the following output in
a .txt file with the name of encoded image and it contains the colored format.
base64 encoded message. The user will decode the base64
message using online decoder tools available on the internet
for free. We added a user friend functionality which is non-
security purpose. It uses to list the .png image files within the
same location.
Usually, the command line tools are developed only to run
within the linux environment. We went one more step and
developed this tool for windows and linux environment
friendly. So, this tool can be run within any windows or linux
platform which contains python interpreter.

F. Product Implementation and Code Review

Now we are going to analyze every function of the code
and going to explain how they works.

This imgData2Binary() function is created to convert image

or text data to binary format. If the data input is string, it will
first convert to ascii, then the ascii value converted in to 8-bit
binary value. If the data input is bytes or multi-dimensional
array (image pixel value - ndarray), it will directly convert to
8-bit binary value.
These are the python libraries which required to develop the
tool.
o Cv2 - This library is used to perform image processing
and computer vision related tasks.
o Numpy - This library is used to perform a wide variety
of mathematical operations on arrays.
o Pyfiglet - This module is used to enhance our
programming experience as well as to enhance the
overall look and structure of the texts used in electronic
communication.
o Termcolor - This library is used for ANSII Color
formatting for output in the terminal.
o Base64 - This module provides functions for encoding
binary data to printable ASCII characters and decoding
such encodings back to binary data.
o Os - The OS module in Python provides functions for
creating and removing a directory (folder), fetching its
contents, changing and identifying the current
directory, etc. This hideData() function is created to hide the secret
message data into the image. Firstly, it will get the pixel
values of the image separately. Then the imgData2Binary()
4 M. THUSHITHARAN, S. KAVISESHAN: STEGANOGRAPHY – AN OVERVIEW OF IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY USING LSB METHODOLOGY.
function called and the RGB values of the pixel assigned to
the r,g,b variables as binary format. Then the function
removes the LSBs of every pixel value of the color until the
secret message’s binary value’s count.
This encodeText() function get the image, secret message,
encoded image name from the user and it will create a new
image file.
This showData() function is used to extract the hidden
binary values of the secret message in the pixel values.
This decodeText() function created to decode the binary
value of the secret message within the encoded image. Then
when we will decode the image, it will throw a base64
encoded text value. For a security purpose we didn’t want to
print the secret message directly in a plain text. So, we added
an extra protection base64 encoding facility. It will give the
base64 encoded output of the secret message. And it will
create an extra .txt file with the name of the encoded image.
This listPngFiles() function has written for list the .png files
from the same folder. This doesn’t concern about the security
part of the product. This function has written for find the OS
platform and execute the listing command of the operating
system. First it will check whether the system is windows or
not. If it is windows, it will execute the “dir *.png” command
which is used to list the png files in windows platform. Or
else if it is linux platform, it will execute the “ls -a *.png”
command which is used to list the png files in linux
platforms.
This steganography() it the main function of this program.
This function contains the encode, decode, list, quit the
program options. If we give the input as 1, it will take us to
image encode function. If we give the input as 2, it will take
us to image decode function. If we give the input as 3, it will
list the .png files within the same folder. If we give the input
5 M. THUSHITHARAN, S. KAVISESHAN: STEGANOGRAPHY – AN OVERVIEW OF IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY USING LSB METHODOLOGY.

as 4, the program will be quit. Further more this function India., 22 February 2019.
contains some validations. If we give any number than
1,2,3,4 , it will throw a warning that tells us to enter the 3. CIOReview, “How SDN and IoT are impacting the
Healthcare Sector” [Online]. Available:
correct value. If we give alphabet or non-number value, it will
https://www.cioreview.com/news/how-sdn-and-iot-are-
throe a warning to enter the correct option value. impacting-the-healthcare-sector-nid-33576-cid-147.html.
[Accessed: 03- April- 2022].
G. Best Security Practices for IoT in Healthcare
Maybe the most difficult aspect of modernizing historical
technologies is ensuring that the infrastructure is secure and
impermeable 8. AUTHOR

1. Complete Security Assessment

Every well-known company must maintain an
accurate and complete inventory of all assets in their facility.
However.
2. Secure IoT technology implementations.
As a few of these ecosystems become linked to
corporate servers and vulnerable to online threats, the
demand.
Thushitharan .M is currently a student at
Sri Lanka Institute of Information
Technology, pursuing his bachelor’s degree
in Information Technology Specializing in
Cyber Security. His current research interests
include the Cyber Security threats and
mitigations in the Healthcare Sector with
emphasis on Medical Internet of Things and
SDN.

H. Healthcare Data Protection Legislation

Regulatory concerns, civil rights, and social norms all
depend on the deployment of IoT data privacy legislation.
IoT data.

4. FUTURE RESEARCH
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is predicted to grow
rapidly in the coming years due to its ability to enhance
patient.

5. CONCLUSION
Usage of IoT devices is very important for current digital era.
Nowadays, many systems have become smarter with the use
of IoT devices.

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
A researcher can get a lot of understandings about the usage
of IoT in healthcare with the emphasis of SDN and the cyber
security threats on healthcare in IoT by making a review
article. I would like to express my gratitude to my Applied
Information Assurance module lecturers and instructors,
senior students, and friends for guiding and encouraging me
in finishing this review paper within the given time. In
addition, I would like to thank for the tech youtubers and
tech bloggers and external security researchers for the help
they offered through their videos, articles, and blogs.

7. REFERENCE
1. “Internet of Things” [Online]. Available:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things.
[Accessed: 03- April- 2022].

2. Srilakshmi A., Mohanapriya P., Harini D., and Geetha K.,

“IoT based Smart Health Care System to Prevent Security
Attacks in SDN” Sastra Deemed to be University Thanjavur,