PRIVATE KEY STEGANOGRAPHY BASED ON AGENT TECHNOLOGY

KRISHNACHAITANYA R
M.tech , Mechatronics, MITE College, Moodbidri, Karnataka, India
Krishnachaitanya.ee@gmail.com

LAXMI GULAPPAGOL
Assistant Professor, Dept. of ECE, MITE College, Moodbidri, Karnataka, India
laxmi@mite.ac.in

ABSTRACT: Steganography is widely practiced in the secret agencies to protect any kind of file
consists of message with a specific image or video. This has been into practice from the ancient
times of Greek Dynasty. The usage of steganography has been increased in the present internet
world for protecting the data with different and specific cover images. Steganography is
significantly used in this project to cover the data or any specific message files are concealed with
most suitable image taken from the image database. This operation is automated wit the agent
based data transmission to populate the message in the public or private community networks. The
proposed project is developed with the steganography technique to cover secrete messages with
the help of HTML documents. In this project HTML documents are proposed to use as a cover
medium to hide the secret messages. HTML documents are basic elements of the world wide web
and commonly not suspicious. The proposed project is incorporated with an agent based system to
take a decision to choose most suitable steganography method to select a cover medium to embed
the targeted secret image and text data

KEYWORDS: Cover-image, Agent, secure communications, text steganography, cryptography,

Data hiding.

INTRODUCTION

The sensitive messages should be protected with appropriate cover medium to avoid hacking. The
security mechanism is essentially required to incorporate the steganography mechanism to safe
guard the interest of users. Cryptography is also another security mechanism to safeguard the
sensitive data. To incorporate the increased security mechanism, the proposed project is developed
with the combination of cryptographic and steganography techniques. Cryptography can change
the shape of the message or text data into encrypted format. This encrypted format can be
identified and noticed by the hackers or intruders and eavesdrops the text and decrypt the same
with different cryptographic techniques. But the steganography will cover the message with some
cover media and kept unnoticed and hide from the attention of eavesdroppers or malicious
intruders. Steganography is predominantly distinguished into three types. These are Text
Steganography, Image Steganography and voice steganography. Text steganography is basically
used to hide the text behind another text file. In this process the redundant text will be hide the
secret message in the text files. This process is some what regarded as difficult application process.
Image steganography is developed on the basis of HVS Human Visual System. The process is
developed on the basis of eye capacity which can not identify the innumerable range of colors and
slightest quality change. The second process i.e. image steganography is more popular than other
steganography format. The third process is Audio Steganography. This is developed on the basis
of human voice to protect the data. But humans have the identification capacity to predict the
slightest change in the human voice quality and frequency. Hence this process is not so popular as
the image based steganography process.

The predominant research scholars like Chin Chen Chang have developed predominant concept
to hide the data in image with the bit substitution. The bit substitution logic has been developed on
the principles of simple least significant bit substitution. This process embeds the secret image in
the least significant bits of the image pixels in the distinguished host image. In this process the
quality of the image is reduced significantly. This degradation can be identified by eavesdroppers
and hackers of sensitive data. The research scholars of next operations have developed a remedy
with the incorporation of Exhaustive LSB Method. In this method the genetic algorithm is used to
search approximate optimal remedy for the problem. This method has executed with lesser
computational period of time to calculate the huge amount of image pixels. The process has been
tested with experimental results and distinguished the stego-image can be visually unidentifiable
from the original cover image. DCT based data hiding technique is enforcing the image attributes
to hide under an image. This process is not degrading the image quality. This process facilitate the
mobile agents to perform the query phase operations of the system. The proposed system is
demonstrating the capability of attributes manipulation and I Fast transmission of retrieval image
to the receiver. In this process the attribute extraction is not mandatory to use in other applications.
The previous researcher Tabais has introduced an agent based advising system. This system is
predominantly revealed the user information who can operate huge set of information and link the
information with relevant objects of specific interest. This project performance is remarkably good
but the slightest flaw has degraded to popularize in the software arena. The agent is created to act
as a software component to act as an authorized representative. Here the agent will work like a
software component to act according to the wish of the user who initiates the action and get the
performance. In this system the agent will search the web for most suitable image for the data
which has to be hidden under the cover. This project has focused on the best cover to be chosen for
a CD ROM consisting of data. The agent can be a software component who can select the images
for CD Cover from online searching. The agent choose the best suitable CD cover depends on the
data written in CD ROM and pass the parameters to the select the online image. In this process the
agent will achieve most suitable steganography model from the server to choose most suitable
stego-image from the server. This model has no flaws and demonstrated the better performing
results in the experiments conducted.

THE SYSTEM DESIGN

Steganography
Steganography is an important and fascinating technology in the field of secure communications
systems. Steganography models have obtained significance in covering the data with image and
video objects. The process of steganography can enable embedding large amount of data in images
or video. This process can be done with out any significant difference between the resulting signal
and data embedded signal generated for an original image. The concept of cover medium is has
introduced from Steganography to play a vital role in the secure computing and conventional
cryptography. Through this process the secure communication system has strengthen as the
cryptographic methods are old and well known to the eavesdroppers and hackers of sensitive data.
The advent of steganography even the encrypted data can also be concealed and communicated to
the targeted destination under cover.

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Steganography has facilitated a cover image to embedded with the communicating sensitive data
and make the transmission of the data unnoticed. Image steganography facilitates the secret
messaging of any secret information in internet with a great security and anonymity. Cryptography
is known for encrypted message conversion. This is an ancient method of converting the sensitive
data into encrypted data. But this is data is well known to the hackers and eavesdroppers. With the
advent of steganography the encrypted data is embedded with the medium signal or image or video
or data to transmit the same to the destinated receiver in safe and secure way. The process of
steganography hides the sensitive data with the help of html tags and its attributes. The
steganography process and mechanism is developed on the basis of ordering of the attributes in the
HTML Tags. Though the tags are safeguarding the sensitive data it will never be reflected with the
sign of the data which is transmitting through it.

Steganography mechanism can be distinguished into three main parts. These are key file
generation, hiding process and finally extraction process.

Key file generation will be done by the steganography method for each and every file is assigned
to transmit through the internet. The Hiding process is incorporated with the hide a message in
HTML documents with the help of embedding mechanism. Finally the extraction process is
specifically designed to extract the hidden sensitive data from the HTML Documents.

Techniques in Steganography
The steganography techniques are classified into several types with different approaches. The
classification process can be done in accordance with the cover modification applied in the
embedding process. The techniques are predominantly classified into 6 types. These are
Substitution Technique., Transform Domain Technique, Spread Spectrum Technique, Statistical
technique, Distortion technique and Cover Generating Technique. These techniques are
predominant in hiding the information of sensitive data in the internet transmission. These
techniques are used and applied on the data and its situation how it can be used and to be
transmitted on demand.

Substitution Technique
The predominant Technique in Steganography is known as Substitution Technique. This technic is
used for hiding the sensitive data into uncompressed digital image through the Least Significant
Bit embedding methods. This technique has no practical difficulties to hide the sensitive data
under the image cover as the image pixels are traversed in a pre-defined pseudorandom order. In
this method Least Significant Bit for each pixels would be converted to replicate the corresponding
bit in the message payload. Data embedding method is highly preferred in the many applications
as it has high embedding rate. The Least Significant Bit method is unleashing a small amplitude
noise signal and further it is resulting stego-image which is completely replicating the cover
image. The ease of use method of image embedding has given raise to the frequency of usage of
the process. The early belief in this process is that the modification of pixels value by 1 in
randomly selected pixels is undetectable. This is happened as the noise presence is mandatory in
this process. LSB model generate the acquired media data with most suitable cover images, video
or audio and takes the advantage generated by the noise presence. In LSB model process methods
the embedding message bits could not cause any minute difference from original data.

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Transforming Domain
The development of Steganography are incorporated with embedding information in the frequency
of domain of a signal. This signal can be regarded as the most robust and render the speciality to
the steganography methods. The predominant steganography technique is used with transform
domain methods to hide the sensitive data in the most remarkable nook and corners of the cover
image. Transform domain method is more robust to sustain any kind of attacks in the internet.
Transform Domain Method is rich with Discrete Cosines Transform and wavelet transform
techniques. The Discrete Cosines Transform method is replicating the Fast Fourier Transform
which is enriched with sinusoidal basis function. Hence the Domain Transform method is using
easy to use method of cosine functions in hiding the images in different multimedia cover medium.
In this method the cover image is not affected with pixels quality degradation and distortion. The
size of the image can be distinguished with the resized quality of 64 numbers. The number quality
manipulation will make the image quality not to affect with the degradation influence. This
process can be achieved by the manipulation of the size with 64 numbers with the quantization
coefficient with out reducing the size. This can be attained by remembering the transform
coefficients of the projections of the Original image used in this domain transform method.The
Proposed System

PROPOSED SYSTEM

The proposed system is developed to hide the confidential data with the help of agent based
steganography system using text and image cover medium. The agent based steganography is a
general assumption to initiate an action in the mechanism of steganography used in this project to
utilize the data base which is rich with loaded images. This project is predominantly using the
images as a cover media. The agent is a software component which will suggest the user to choose
appropriate and most suitable cover media according to the confidential matter is transforming in
the internet arena. The image is the nearest match to the message what is embedded with the cover
media. This process is incorporated in the client server architecture. The agent will search the
appropriate images from server system and suggest the same to the user who is intended to send
the secret data from his computer to the destination node or computer through internet. The server
is loaded with different kinds of bmp files and the client system is rich with steganography to
select the appropriate bmp files from the server system to match with the confidential data
information from client system. The user has to choose the suggested bmp files from the server
and use the same cover media to transmit the data with the help of steganography coverage
methodology to the destinated targets.

The agent based proposed system is developed to perform the operations of selecting the bmp
images and analyse the features of the images taken from the server. Based on the features which
are more suitable to match with the features of the message has to be kept for merging. The
steganography mechanism will choose the suitable image and embed the message with the image
and cover the message. The best suitable steganography method will also be suggested by the
agent for choosing the best one. The user can select the best suitable steganography method along
with the best suitable cover media for the confidential information to be sent from his place to the
targeted destination.

The user will initiate the steganography process. The steganography process will convert the
confidential information into encrypted data and generate a key. The encrypted data will be

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embedded with the cover media and the hiding process will be initiated. The hiding process will
embed the encrypted text and HTML Cover Media to develop a stego text.

Figure 1 : the process of hiding the secret message

THE RESULTS

The project is executed and simulated in the Matlab a simulation software. The project is designed
with client and server architecture. The client system is rich with steganography process. The
server system is loaded with the bmp files. The agent based steganography is selecting the most
appropriate bmp files from the server and keep for selection by the user. The user can select the
appropriate and distinct image and message for processing. The client system which is rich with
steganography will encrypt the information into encrypted data then embed the data with the cover
medium (HTML) and prepare the stego-text. This stego- text will consist of highest security and
affect the resulted security of the whole system. The following features by agent can be specified
as here under.

Histogram: Histogram can be identified based on the gray level values versus the number of pixels
of the image.
Mean: This can be calculated with the average value to demonstrate the general brightness of the
image used in this project.
Standard Deviation: The standard deviation can be calculated as square root of variance to
illustrate the level of contrast.
Entropy: This is used to measure the bits needed for code the image data. The pixel values in the
image are distributed among the levels of gray levels. If the gray levels are improved automatically
the entropy will also get increased.
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: This is highly necessary to calculate the quality of the STEGO-
IMAGE. This is basically used to judge the similarity between the host image and the stego-image.

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Correlation [Corr]: Correlation is used to measure the similarity between original image and stego-
image.

Figure 2 : Result obtained in matlab using simulink showing histogram plot and calculation of
image features

CONCLUSION

The paper agent based steganography in HTML cover medium is developed to avoid the attackers,
eavesdroppers and hackers attacks in the internet and to transform the secret messages in a smooth
and secure way. The proposed paper has implemented the highest security to develop stego-image
which is the combination of secrete image and HTML tags and attributes. The main purpose of the
project to hide the text or secrete text with the help of bmp image files through embedding
operation. The project is rich with two predominant mechanisms. These are encryption of text

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messages and the embedding operation to hide the encrypted text with the cover medium i.e.
HTML documents. The present project is developed with novel agent based steganography
mechanism to transform the secret messages in the internet with highest possible security. The
simulation results are obtained and evaluated to meet the goal of the project.

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