• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.1051-1077
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• 2021

The secure communication of information is a major concern over the internet. The information must be protected before transmitting over a communication channel to avoid security violations. In this paper, a new hybrid method called compressed encrypted data embedding (CEDE) is proposed. In CEDE, the secret information is first compressed with Lempel Ziv Welch (LZW) compression algorithm. Then, the compressed secret information is encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric block cipher. In the last step, the encrypted information is embedded into an image of size 512 × 512 pixels by using image steganography. In the steganographic technique, the compressed and encrypted secret data bits are divided into pairs of two bits and pixels of the cover image are also arranged in four pairs. The four pairs of secret data are compared with the respective four pairs of each cover pixel which leads to sixteen possibilities of matching in between secret data pairs and pairs of cover pixels. The least significant bits (LSBs) of current and imminent pixels are modified according to the matching case number. The proposed technique provides double-folded security and the results show that stego image carries a high capacity of secret data with adequate peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and lower mean square error (MSE) when compared with existing methods in the literature.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.1248-1266
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• 2012

This paper presents a multilevel reversible data hiding method based on histogram shifting which can recover the original image losslessly after the hidden data has been extracted from the stego-image. The method of prediction is adopted in our proposed scheme and prediction errors are produced to explore the similarity of neighboring pixels. In this article, we propose two different predictors to generate the prediction errors, where the prediction is carried out using the center prediction method and the JPEG-LS median edge predictor (MED) to exploit the correlation among the neighboring pixels. Instead of the original image, these prediction errors are used to hide the secret information. Moreover, we also present an improved method to search for peak and zero pairs and also talk about the analogy of the same to improve the histogram shifting method for huge embedding capacity and high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). In the one-level hiding, our method keeps image qualities larger than 53 dB and the ratio of embedding capacity has 0.43 bpp (bit per pixel). Besides, the concept with multiple layer embedding procedure is applied for obtaining high capacity, and the performance is demonstrated in the experimental results. From our experimental results and analytical reasoning, it shows that the proposed scheme has higher PSNR and high data embedding capacity than that of other reversible data hiding methods presented in the literature.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.29-36
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• 2015

Steganography is the technique of hiding the existence of a secret message that is communicated hiddenly. Generally, the main objectives of this paper is to develop newer and more sophisticated steganographic techniques based on perceptual transparency, robustness and capacity of the hidden data. This paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of image steganography techniques and proposes an effective method. As a result, the images steganography technique based on good ELSB and DCT which applies the rearranged key is secure and effective.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.268-274
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• 2010

A steganographic method using three directional data embedding for gray images is presented in this paper. Cover image is divided into non-overlapping $2\times2$ sub-blocks and the basis pixel is selected to calculate the three different values of each sub-block. Difference values are replaced by embedding the number of secret bits that is referenced by the range table. For the three pixel pairs in the sub-block, the optimal pixel adjustment is preceded to reduce the distortion of visual quality. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a good visual quality and high capacity.

• Proceedings of the CALSEC Conference
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• 2004.02a
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• pp.223-226
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• 2004

Several studies have shown that the trust is a significant barrier for realizing the potential of e-commerce. Trust is not only a short-term issue but also the most significant long-term barrier for realizing the potentials of e-commerce. Because digital contents which have been used in e-commerce are easy to be duplicated, the enforcement of digital copyright protection is an important issue. Watermarking is a technique for labeling digital pictures by hiding secret information in the image. In this paper, a discrete wavelet transform(DWT) based technique for embedding digital watermark into image is proposed. The performance of the proposed watermarking is robust to a variety of signal distortions, such as JPEG and image processing operations.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.608-616
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• 2005

Watermarking has become a technology of choice for a broad range of multimedia copyright protection applications. This paper proposes an audio watermarking scheme that uses the modified tonal masker as an embedding carrier for imperceptible and robust audio watermarking. The method of embedding is to select one of the tonal maskers using a secret key, and to then modify the frequency signals that consist of the tonal masker without changing the sound pressure level. The modified tonal masker can be found using the same secret key without the original sound, and the embedded information can be extracted. The results show that the frequency signals are stable enough to keep embedded watermarks against various common signal processing types, while at the same time the proposed scheme has a robust performance.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.577-590
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• 2013

Shamir's (k,n)-threshold secret sharing scheme is not secure against cheating by attacker because the signature of participants is omitted. To prevent cheating, many schemes have been proposed, and a proactive secret sharing is one of those. The proactive secret sharing is a method to update shares in the secret sharing scheme at irregular intervals. In this paper, a proactive image secret sharing scheme over $GF(2^8)$ is proposed for the first time. For the past 30 years, Galois field operation is widely used in order to perform the efficient and secure bit operation in cryptography, and the proposed scheme with update phase of shadow image over $GF(2^8)$) at irregular intervals provides the lossless and non-compromising of secret image. To evaluate security and efficiency of images (i.e. cover and shadow images) distortion between the proposed scheme and the previous schemes, embedding capacity and PSNR are compared in experiments. The experimental results show that the performances of the embedding capacity and image distortion ratio of the proposed scheme are superior to the previous schemes.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.6
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• pp.173-179
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• 2013

The traditional key exchange protocols are transmitted by using the cryptographic. However, these protocols are compromised by the attacker. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a key exchange protocol based on the steganography with the QR code. The steganography technique embed secret information to the images, documents, videos, and MP3 files and transmit to the others. The attacker can't know that the transmission data is the secret data. Therefore, the sender transmits efficiently and safely the secret data to the others. In additional, the cover image is using the QR code image to insert the secret key. If attackers scan the QR code, then they just read the information or connect URL. They can not be recognized that the QR code image is hiding the secret key. The experiments compare the QR code image with the well-known image about the distortion and the safety.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.1938-1962
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• 2015

Security of information during transmission is a major issue in this modern era. All of the communicating bodies want confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of their secret information. Researchers have presented various schemes to cope with these Internet security issues. In this context, both steganography and cryptography can be used effectively. However, major limitation in the existing steganographic methods is the low-quality output stego images, which consequently results in the lack of security. To cope with these issues, we present an efficient method for RGB images based on gray level modification (GLM) and multi-level encryption (MLE). The secret key and secret data is encrypted using MLE algorithm before mapping it to the grey-levels of the cover image. Then, a transposition function is applied on cover image prior to data hiding. The usage of transpose, secret key, MLE, and GLM adds four different levels of security to the proposed algorithm, making it very difficult for a malicious user to extract the original secret information. The proposed method is evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively. The experimental results, compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms, show that the proposed algorithm not only enhances the quality of stego images but also provides multiple levels of security, which can significantly misguide image steganalysis and makes the attack on this algorithm more challenging.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.4
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• pp.69-75
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• 2014

A novel reversible data hiding method using pixel value ordering and prediction error expansion in the sub-block is resented in this paper. For each non-overlapping $2{\times}2$ sub-block, we divide into two groups. In the min group, the lowest value is changed to embed a secret bit and the highest value is changed in the max group. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a good visual quality and high capacity. The proposed method can embed 13,900 bits on average, it is higher 4,553 bits than the previous method and the visual quality is maintained 31.39dB on average.