Steganography Using Ice Encryption Algorithm. 6

Thesis: (BSCS major in Computer Science) - Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila 2005. 56

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ABSTRACT In this thesis, we presented Steganography which refers to the practice of hiding secret messages in communications over a public channel so that an eavesdropper (who listens to all communications) cannot even tell that a secret message is being sent. Steganography is the art of hiding information in ways that prevent its detection. Though steganography is an ancient craft, the onset of computer technology has given it new life. Computer-based steganographic techniques introduce changes to digital covers to embed information foreign to the native covers. Such information may be communicated in the form of text, binary files, or provide additional information about the cover and its owner such as digital watermarks or fingerprints. With this, we had enhanced the thesis of Digital Watermarking as our basis of study since steganography is very related to Digital Watermarking. We also integrated encryption algorithm specifically the ICE Encryption Algorithm, compression algorithm such as Huffman algorithm and the watermarking algorithm which is the Cox's Scheme algorithm. Our system hides and recovers a message, text file or image file in different file formats within digital imagery while maintaining the original image size and dynamic range. But our focused in this thesis is the use of ICE encryption algorithm in the use of password in steganography. The hidden message can be recovered using appropriate keys without any knowledge of the original image. The message hidden in the image can be recovered by the user's password. Our system can also detect if there is already an embedded message in an image where it cannot be deleted, updated and manipulated by other users. In our system, the user can see the pixels where the message is hidden. To make our system run better we integrated compression algorithm which is the Huffman compression algorithm where it can compress the embedded files. If the message has been recovered then this will decompress the files. Huffman encoding, an algorithm for the lossless compression of files based on the frequency of occurrence of a symbol in the file that is being compressed. The Huffman algorithm is based on statistical coding, which means that the probability of a symbol has a direct bearing on the length of its representation. The more probable the occurrence of a symbol is, the shorter will be its bit-size representation.

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