A Novel RGB Image Steganography Using Simulated Annealing and LCG via LSB

The enormous prevalence of transferring official confidential digital documents via the Internet shows the urgent need to deliver confidential messages to the recipient without letting any unauthorized person to know contents of the secret messages or detect there existence . Several Steganography techniques such as the least significant Bit (LSB), Secure Cover Selection (SCS), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Palette Based (PB) were applied to prevent any intruder from analyzing and getting the secret transferred message. The utilized steganography methods should defiance the challenges of Steganalysis techniques in term of analysis and detection. This paper presents a novel and robust framework for color image steganography that combines Linear Congruential Generator (LCG), simulated annealing (SA), Cesar cryptography and LSB substitution method in one system in order to reduce the objection of Steganalysis and deliver data securely to their destination. SA with the support of LCG finds out the optimal minimum sniffing path inside a cover color image (RGB) then the confidential message will be encrypt and embedded within the RGB image path as a host medium by using Cesar and LSB procedures. Embedding and extraction processes of secret message require a common knowledge between sender and receiver; that knowledge are represented by SA initialization parameters, LCG seed, Cesar key agreement and secret message length. Steganalysis intruder will not understand or detect the secret message inside the host image without the correct knowledge about the manipulation process. The constructed system satisfies the main requirements of image steganography in term of robustness against confidential message extraction, high quality visual appearance, little mean square error (MSE) and high peak signal noise ratio (PSNR).