ACA Based Image Steganography

LSB-based steganography is a simple and well known information hiding technique. In most LSB based techniques, a secret message is embedded into a specific position of LSB in the cover pixels. On the other hand, the main threat of LSB-based steganography is steganalysis. This paper proposes an asynchronous-cellular-automata(ACA)-based steganographic method, where secret bits are embedded into the selected position inside the cover pixel by ACA rule 51 and a secret key. As a result, it is very difficult for malicious users to retrieve a secret message from a cover image without knowing the secret key, even if the extraction algorithm is known. In addition, another layer of security is provided by almost random (rule-based) selection of a cover pixel for embedding using ACA and a different secret key. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed method can be secured against the well-known steganalysis RS-attack.