Steganography and Covert Communications in Open Systems Environment

Steganography is basically about embedding a secret message in an innocuous wrapper, to communicate privately in an open channel. This area of study got widespread popularity after its alleged use by many extremist groups while hatching and executing their plans remotely. Because of this, in the recent past, many law enforcement and government agencies have also shown keen interest in it. There are many other reasons like digital right management applications (watermarking and finger printing), which acted as catalyst too. This paper proposes a new steganographic encoding scheme which separates the colour channels of the windows bitmap images and then hides messages randomly in the LSB of one colour component of a chosen pixel where the colour components of the other two are found to be equal to the key selected.