A Steganography Model Using the Randomized Salt LSB Technique for Cyber Physical Systems

In today’s world, with the advancement of technology, there is always a possibility of sensitive information being exposed during communication. Privacy is the most essential property of any communication, specifically where computation, network, and physical processes are tied together. To address this issue, one of the most popular security methods, steganography, has been used for many years. This chapter discusses and compares various methods of steganography. The study analyzes various existing steganography methods and identifies issues like robustness, visibility of information, security, integrity, and capacity. The state-of-the-art steganography tries to overcome these issues, but still, there is scope to improve them. To address these issues, this chapter proposes a security model to increase the robustness of the steganography methods with high capacity and low detectability. Here, we propose a novel steganography method based on the LSB method. The proposed work integrates existing cryptographic techniques to efficiently store data in the cover image. It includes randomized salts to increase invisibility and error-correction code (ECC) blocks with proper padding to prevent the loss of data during transmission. Embedding information is made secure by introducing ECC and strong cryptographic techniques like AES. The employed data-embedding procedures are efficient and do not distort images because optimal pattern sizes are determined and appropriate pixels are chosen for modification. We also consider the LSB modification and padding processes in such a way that data capacity is maximized while relatively keeping the quality and the fidelity of the image intact. Thus, the proposed steganography model produces a lossless result in cyber physical systems.