DATA STEGANOGRAPHY USING EMBEDDED PRIVATE KEY

LSB2 method of data steganography is one of the most popular methods used to hide secret messages in digital color image. This method keeps the quality of the holding image high but it is not secure and it can be easily hacked.In this paper a method of improving the security of LSB2 method will be proposed, tested and implemented. The added security issues are simple and do require extra memory and time for execution. An embedded key will be extracted from the holding image to encrypt the message, this key will be variable and depends on the selected covering image, selected message length and selected position in the image where to extract the embedded key; the selected position and message length will form a private key to enhance LSB2 security.