A Hybrid Approach on Uncompressed Images Using LSB Steganography: S-Tool

Steganography is the art of hiding text, image or audio files in an image. It ensures that the hidden secret data is securely transmitted between the intended users. S-Tool is a steganography software developed by Andy Brown in 1995. In this software the secret data is initially encrypted before being embedded onto the image. In this paper we propose an enhanced version of this software which provides better security for the embedded data. The key undergoes two levels of hashing which in turn is used as the key for encryption. In this system we prefer IDEA algorithm for encryption of text data. A random number generator based on the hash values are used to identify the pixel positions where the cipher data is to be placed.