A NOVEL IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHIC SYSTEM BASED ON EXACT MATCHING ALGORITHM AND KEY-DEPENDENT DATA TECHNIQUE

Steganography is defined as the art of hiding secret information. It is used to guarantee information accessibility only by authorized parties. The least-significant bit (LSB) approach is one of the most important scenarios in steganography. However, the existing LSB approaches apply some changing in the image’s pixels values, which make the image suspected by intruders and hackers. This paper proposed an image steganography system based on the exact matching between the image’s pixel values and the secret data. As well as, a random key-dependent data (RKDD) is generated without performing any changes on the image’s pixel values. Moreover, the proposed system has been tested successfully on many images giving promising results. These significant results can be perceived in terms of fast searching time, great number of matches, reduced key size, achieving steganography performance criteria, invisibility, payload/ capacity and robustness.