MSE_LSB Method of Message Steganography

A modified, secure and efficient LSB based method (MSE_LSB) of message steganography will be introduced. The single character of the secret message will be hidden in spaced covering bytes. The covering-stego bytes will be reordered and scattered based on the contents of the generated secret indices key, this key will be used to reorder and reorder back the covering-stego bytes. The proposed MSE_LSB method will use a complicated private key, this key will provide a huge key space capable to make it strong enough to resist hacking attacks; the extracted message will be very sensitive to the selected private key. The secret indices key will be generated using chaotic logistic parameters for short and medium messages, and an image_key will be used to generate the indices key for long messages to keep the method efficient. The proposed method will modify and simplify the processes of characters hiding and extracting by using simple assignment operation. The image_key will replace the chaotic logistic key to reduce the key generation time, this is because long chaotic key will require a long time, thus the speed of message steganography will be negatively affected. The proposed MSE_LSB method will be tested and implemented using various short, medium and long messages, the obtained results will be used to prove the fact that the proposed method will meet the requirements of good stego system (quality, security, sensitivity and speed). The speed results of the proposed method will be compared with other methods speeds to show how the proposed method will increase the speed of message steganography by decreasing both the hiding and extracting times.