An image steganography technique using X-box mapping

Image steganography is a method of concealing information into a cover image to hide it. Least Significant-Bit (LSB) based approach is most popular steganographic techniques in spatial domain due to its simplicity and hiding capacity. This paper presents a novel technique for Image steganography based on LSB using X-box mapping where we have used several X-boxes having unique data. The embedding part is done by this Steganography algorithm where we use four unique X-boxes with sixteen different values (represented by 4-bits) and each value is mapped to the four LSBs of the cover image. This mapping provides sufficient security to the payload because without knowing the mapping rules no one can extract the secret data (payload).