Unlocking Image Steganography: How Least Significant Bits Conceal Data 🔍

Andrew, Mira, Gregory, and Sara are students in the CyberSecurity Engineering program at George Mason University. During Spring 2020, they all worked and implemented an Least Significant Bits in Image Steganography Project that is described below. Our program takes in a photo and copies it into .bmp file format. Bitmap images lose less data when transferring it between sources than JPEG images. It then takes a message and reads in all the characters in the image into their 7-bit ascii code representations. We chose to use a vector of strings to store each of the ascii values. After that, the limits of blue, red, and green were stored into a vector as well. For the chaos function, we used MATLAB’s built-in rand function, and we used 2 different functions: one for the x axis and one for the y axis. The proper numbers to recreate the function were written to a key.txt file. Then, for each character, the program parses through and finds the x-y coordinate based on what was found in the chaos function and stores the current ascii bit into the LSB of the blue, red, or green field. After every value had been stored, the program writes to the modified image.