Steganography using Hexa Sudoku Puzzle in Color Images
M. Krishna Teja, M. Haneesh Krishna, K Mukesh · 2011
Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended receiver suspects the existence of the messages, a form of security through obscurity (hard to understand). Steganography is closely related to the problem of hidden channels and secure operating system design, a term which refers to all communication paths that cannot easily be restricted by access control mechanisms Steganography has developed a lot in recent years, because digital techniques allow new ways of hiding information inside other information's, and this can be valuable in a lot of situations. The original work was proposed by Chang et al. in 2008, he was successful in using the Sudoku solutions to guide cover pixels to modify pixel values so that secret messages can be embedded. His work was also extended by various others in their they have used a 9×9 reference matrix and a 9×9 Sudoku with base 9 system for the representation of the secret message. We here proposed a method which is an extension to the Chang et al's work. Here we use a 16×16 Sudoku which has a 64×64 reference matrix instead of 256×256 matrix as proposed in the previous method and base 16 system for the representation of the secret message. On an average the embedding capacity of the proposed method is 4 bits per pixel, which is greater than that of the previous works. More over this method is for the Colored Images where as the previous method is for the grey scale images.