A Lightweight Hybrid Scheme for Hiding Text Messages in Colour Images Using LSB, Lah Transform and Chaotic Techniques

Data security can involve embedding hidden images, text, audio, or video files within other media to prevent hackers from stealing encrypted data. Existing mechanisms suffer from a high risk of security breaches or large computational costs, however. The method proposed in this work incorporates low-complexity encryption and steganography mechanisms to enhance security during transmission while lowering computational complexity. In message encryption, it is recommended that text file data slicing in binary representation, to achieve different lengths of string, be conducted before text file data masking based on the lightweight Lucas series and mod function to ensure the retrieval of text messages is impossible. The steganography algorithm starts by generating a random key stream using a hybrid of two low-complexity chaotic maps, the Tent map and the Ikeda map. By finding a position vector parallel to the input image vector, these keys are used based on the previously generated position vector to randomly select input image data and create four vectors that can be later used as input for the Lah transform. In this paper, we present an approach for hiding encrypted text files using LSB colour image steganography by applying a low-complexity XOR operation to the most significant bits in 24-bit colour cover images. It is necessary to perform inverse Lah transformation to recover the image pixels and ensure that invisible data cannot be retrieved in a particular sequence. Evaluation of the quality of the resulting stego-images and comparison with other ways of performing encryption and message concealment shows that the stego-image has a higher PSNR, a lower MSE, and an SSIM value close to one, illustrating the suitability of the proposed method. It is also considered lightweight in terms of having lower computational overhead.