Image Steganography using Secret Key & Gray Codes
Sunny Dagar1, Vinay Kumar2, Yogendra Bagoriya3

1Sunny Dagar, Department of Information Technology, Centre Development of Advanced Computing CDAC, Noida (U.P), India.
2Vinay Kumar, Department of Information Technology, Centre Development of Advanced Computing CDAC, Noida (U.P), India.
3Yogendra Bagoriya, Department of Information Technology, Centre Development of Advanced Computing CDAC, Noida (U.P), India.
Manuscript received on 15 April 2013 | Revised Manuscript received on 22 April 2013 | Manuscript Published on 30 April 2013 | PP: 241-245 | Volume-2 Issue-5, April 2013 | Retrieval Number: E0647032413/13©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Abstract: Steganography is an art of hiding some data into another data. Steganography is a very ancient technique which is used to send secret messages inside a simple message e.g. message written through invisible ink etc. Image steganography is a science of hiding secret data i.e. text, audio, video etc. inside an image. In this paper, an image steganography algorithm is proposed which uses secret key and gray codes to hide the secret file inside the cover image. This algorithm takes image of any format like .jpeg, .gif, .bmp etc. as a carrier and converts it into .bmp format. As .bmp image uses lossless compression techniques so compression of .bmp image doesn’t lose any information. Although this paper will not emphasis on image compression. Then the secret data bits are encrypted using gray codes and then this encrypted file is hidden in the LSB of carrier image. The main aim is to prevent the identification of presence of secret data in the carrier image. But use of key increases the security of the secret data
Keywords: Steganography, Cryptography, Secret Key, LSB Coding, Gray Codes.

Scope of the Article: Image Security