Image Authentication by Hiding Large Volume of Data and Secure Message Transmission Technique using Mask (IAHLVDSMTTM)

The paper presents an image authentication and secures message transmission technique by embedding message/image into color images. Authentication is done by embedding message/image by choosing image blocks of size 3 times 3 called mask from the source image in row major order. The position of insertion is chosen within the mask according to the formula k % s and (k + 1) % s + 1 where k and s are any number between 0 to 7 and 2 to 7 respectively. The dimension of authenticating image followed by MD-5 key and then the content of authenticating message/image are also embedded. This is followed by an XOR operation of the embedded image with another self generated MD-5 key obtained from the source image. The decoding is done by applying the reverse algorithm. The result has been tested with the aid of Histogram analysis, noise analysis and standard deviation computation of the source image with the embedded image and has been compared with popular existing steganographic algorithms like S-Tools where the proposed IAHLVDDSMTTM is capable to hide large volume of data than S-Tools and shows better performance.