A hash-based approach for colour image steganography

In this, paper we propose a novel hash-based approach for colour image steganography. As, the available approaches for colour image steganography are using chaos-based and symmetric-key based cryptographic algorithms are not efficient and good for bulky data. However, the hash-based algorithms based approaches are considerably better in terms of providing better speed but these approaches are vulnerable in terms of providing security due to inherent flaws caused by used checksum approach. The key reason of vulnerability is that the used algorithms in such approaches such as MD5 and SHA-2 have flaws. In our approach, we purpose the use of perfect hash-function algorithm to provide a secure and fast approach for colour image steganography. We also present a prototype tool in this paper that is implementation of the presented approach and is also a proof of concept. Another contribution of the approach is that the presented approach can be used for coding data in any type of colour images such as bmp, jpeg, gif, and tiff as other available approaches are file format specific. The results of the initial experiments are very encouraging and support not only the used approach but also uphold the potential of the presented approach in general.