Copyright © 2018 IJECCE, All right reserved 1 International Journal of Electronics Communication and Computer Engineering Volume 9, Issue 1, ISSN (Online): 2249–071X Conceal Data in Digital Image Processing by using Steganography Mohammad Khaleel Sallam Ma’aitah * and Kamil Dimililer Date of publication (dd/mm/yyyy): 08/01/2018 Abstract – Steganography is the science that involves communicating secret data in an appropriate multimedia carrier, such as (image, audio, and video files). It is always non visible. Steganography has various useful applications. The main objectives of steganography are undetectability, robustness (resistance to various image processing methods and compression) and capacity of the hidden data. These are the main factors which make it different from other techniques watermarking and cryptography. This project includes the important steganography method called LSB technique and the main focus is on the review of steganography in digital images, and apply this technique via VB application for implementation. Keywords – Steganography, Robustness, Cryptography, Communication technologies, LSB RGB based steganography. I. INTRODUCTION The communication technologies around us has grown at a great pace in recent times. For exchanging of data these days everyone is depending of high speed computer networks like internet which is quite unprotected and information can get exposed. Vast amount of personal data is often collected, used and transferred to third party organizations for a variety of reasons. Hence data security is becoming a serious problems in data communication via Internet or any other media. Steganography or Cryptography can be used to protect sensitive data. Steganography is often considered better than cryptography because the intended secret message does not attract attention to itself for scrutiny. Steganography is the art of concealing a message, image or file within another message. One of the major requirements of data hiding is that the hidden data must be imperceptible. The use of steganography has many advantages and are very useful in digital image processing which makes them suitable for a wide variety of applications. In this modern area, internet offers great convenience in transmitting large amounts of data in different parts of the world. However, the safety and security of long distance communication remains an issue. In order to solve this problem of security and safety has led to the development of steganography schemes. Steganography is different from watermarking and cryptography. The main objective of steganography is to hide the existence of the message itself, which makes it difficult for an observer to figure out where exactly the message is. While cryptography techniques tend to secure communications by changing the data into a form so that it cannot be understand by an eavesdropper. Steganography is the type of hidden communication that means “covered writing” from the Greek words stego or “covered” and graphos or “to write”, Jerome Cardan, an Italian mathematician, proposed a scheme of secret writing where a paper mask with holes is used. The user needs to write his secret message in such holes after placing the mask over a blank sheet of paper. Then remove the mask to fill in the blank parts of the page and in this way the message appears as innocuous text. II. RELATED WORK Steganography is the practice of hiding private or sensitive information within something that appears to be nothing out of the usual. Steganography is often confused with cryptology because the two are similar in the way that they both are used to protect important information. The difference between the two is that Steganography involves hiding information so it appears that no information is hidden at all. If a person or persons views the object that the information is hidden inside of he or she will have no idea that there is any hidden information, therefore the person will not attempt to decrypt the information. Steganography comes from the Greek words Steganos (Covered) and Graptos (Writing). Steganography in the modern day sense of the word usually refers to information or a file that has been concealed inside a digital Picture, Video or Audio file. What Steganography essentially does is exploit human perception, human senses are not trained to look for files that have information hidden inside of them, although there are programs available that can do what is called Steganalysis (Detecting use of Steganography.) The most common use of Steganography is to hide a file inside another file. When information or a file is hidden inside a carrier file, the data is usually encrypted with a password. Throughout history Steganography has been used to secretly communicate information between people. Some examples of use of Steganography in past times are: 1. During World War 2 invisible ink was used to write information on pieces of paper so that the paper appeared to the average person as just being blank pieces of paper. Liquids such as urine, milk, vinegar and fruit juices were used, because when each one of these substances are heated they darken and become visible to the human eye. 2. In Ancient Greece they used to select messengers and shave their head, they would then write a message on their head. Once the message had been written the hair was allowed to grow back. After the hair grew back the messenger was sent to deliver the message, the recipient would shave off the messengers hair to see the secret message. 3. Another method used in Greece was where someone would peel wax off a tablet that was covered in wax, write a message underneath the wax then re-apply the wax. The recipient of the message would simply remove the wax from the tablet to view the message. East significant bit (LSB) based-RGB intensity steganography technique