Evaluation of Various LSB based Methods of Image Steganography on GIF File Format

Steganography is the art of hiding the fact that communication is taking place, by hiding information in other information. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency on the Internet. There have been many steganographic techniques available for hiding message in image having its own strength and weaknesses. Steganography can be carried out on any digital media. The chosen media for this system are GIF images. It is chosen due to wide use in web pages. In this paper we look at all the available image based steganography along with the cryptography technique to achieve security. This paper will focus on hiding the message in the least significant bits of the colors of the pixels of a GIF image. We discuss results obtained from evaluating available steganographic techniques and compare the different methods according to the vulnerability. In this paper we also discuss some application of steganography in network security