Secure Key Distribution with Steganography: Enhancing Symmetric Cipher Security 🔐

The quondam problem of key distribution for symmetric ciphers has been, and still is, an essential
element of secure information communications. In this proposed technique, we use ideas originated from
steganography to hide the encryption key in the transmitted cipher text itself. The method begins by dividing
the encryption key into an agreed-upon number of sub-keys. These sub-keys are concealed in the cipher
text using a set of locations, known only to the sender and the receiver, as a shared secret. Then one transmits
the resulting slightly longer message to the receiver where he or she can retrieve the key and decrypt the
original message. We conjecture that since the cipher text is a set of pseudo-random bits, embedding the
pseudo-random bits representing the key will not be traceable. The proposed approach is suitable for both
software and hardware implementations.