A steganographic technique based on VLSB method using RC4 stream cipher

This paper presents a steganographic technique for embedding a secret file (any file e.g. audio,video) into a color image. We have used RC4 technique to generate pseudo random position for embedding secret data. After determining the position embedding is done using Variable Least Significant Bit (V LSB) method. The number of bits embedded into a pixel depends on the pixel value itself. An (N × N) cover image is divided into q number of (b×b) blocks and for each block RC4 method has been applied. 2q different key values for random key generation of q blocks are the secret key here. As RC4 algorithm is being used for randomizing the position of embedding, this method ensures higher level of security with good embedding capacity. Besides that the amount of embedded bits into a pixel purely depends upon the pixel itself, so the image quality is less distorted.