A LSB Based Image Steganography Using Random Pixel and Bit Selection for High Payload

Security in digital communication is becoming more important as the number of systems is connected to the internet day by day. It is necessary to protect secret message during transmission over insecure channels of the internet. Thus, data security becomes an important research issue. Steganography is a technique that embeds secret information into a carrier such as images, audio files, text files, and video files so that it cannot be observed. In this paper, based on spatial domain, a new image steganography method is proposed to ensure the privacy of the digital data during transmission over the internet. In this method, least significant bit substitution is proposed where the information embedded in the random bit position of a random pixel location of the cover image using Pseudo Random Number Generator (PRNG). The proposed method used a 3-3-2 approach to hide a byte in a pixel of a 24 bit color image. The method uses Pseudo Random Number Generator (PRNG) in two different stages of embedding process. The first one is used to select random pixels and the second PRNG is used select random bit position into the R, G and B values of a pixel to embed one byte of information. Due to this randomization, the security of the system is expected to increase and the method achieves a very high maximum hiding capacity which signifies the importance of the proposed method.