Received: 31 January 2020 Revised: 12 April 2020 Accepted: 13 April 2020 DOI: 10.1002/ett.3984 SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE Application of Lah transform for security and privacy of data through information hiding in telecommunication Sudipta Kr Ghosal 1 Souradeep Mukhopadhyay 2 Sabbir Hossain 2 Ram Sarkar 2 1 Department of Computer Science & Technology, Nalhati Government Polytechnic, Birbhum, India 2 Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India Correspondence Ram Sarkar, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700032, India. Email: ramjucse@gmail.com Abstract Due to rapid growth of digital communication attributed to advancement of Internet technologies, at every time instant huge amount of multimedia infor- mation is created and transmitted on the Internet. However, ownership identifi- cation, copyright violation, and identity theft are proving as the serious concerns because of the malicious attacks or hacking of open information. Attackers can alter or delete the information, and claim the ownership or prevent the receiver to get the data. Hence, researchers try to address such challenges. One such effort is concerned with multimedia data hiding through Steganography. In this article, a polynomial sequence generator called Lah Transform (LhT) is applied for developing a Steganography method. LhT generates an integer poly- nomial sequence in coefficient form by evaluating the pixel values using addition and multiplication. Initially, the cover image is partitioned into nonoverlapping b-pixel groups (where, b = 3 or 4) which in succession are converted into trans- form domain using LhT in row-major order. Secret bits are embedded into the LhT coefficients in varying proportions to achieve variable payload. Coefficient adjustment followed by the embedding process ensures minimum quality distor- tion. Inverse LhT is applied to regenerate b-pixel groups in the spatial domain. Results assure that incongruity between the cover pixels and stego-pixels rises as the value of b increases. Hence, to achieve a high payload, smaller values of b are chosen. The proposed method yields higher peak signal to noise ratio values and payload compared to some recent methods found in the literature. Code of our method is available here. 1 INTRODUCTION Easy accessibility is one of the main reasons for the exponential growth of Internet. Various applications 1,2,3 have made the Internet attractive to the common people, and also because these applications make life easier. The assimilation of several low-cost devices that include sensors and actuators, and the rapid growth of wireless communication technologies allowing such devices to connect to the Internet, which in turn, helps expanding the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) in our everyday life. This massive deployment causes netizens to face huge security and privacy risks. To be specific, the very nature of resource-constrained devices makes the world of Internet vulnerable to different security attacks. In this context, it can be said that data accessibility presents new challenges in terms of security and privacy of data due to the confidential and sensitive nature of such personal data. For example, malicious attackers can produce false data Trans Emerging Tel Tech. 2020;e3984. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ett © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1 of 20 https://doi.org/10.1002/ett.3984