An Efficient Steganography Method Based on Chaotic Functions and XOR Operation for Data Hiding

The advancing technology and digitalizing world have increased the importance of secure data transmission. Steganography, a technique that ensures secure data communication, is a critical component of data security. Derived from the term meaning "hidden writing" in Turkish, steganography is based on the principle of embedding the data to be hidden into a carrier medium. While historically applied using primitive methods, steganography has transitioned to the use of modern techniques and methods in today’s digitalized era. In this study, a steganography method based on chaotic functions and the XOR operation is proposed. The proposed method consists of two stages. In the first stage, data embedding, the data to be hidden is first converted into binary format. This binary data is then subjected to an XOR operation with a tent map sequence. The resulting final data is embedded into a grayscale image by determining its embedding positions using a logistic map. In the second stage, data extraction, the embedded message is retrieved using the logistic map, and the extracted message is XORed with the tent map to recover the original data. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated using commonly employed metrics such as PSNR, MSE, and SSIM on images in the literature. The results demonstrate that the proposed method offers a robust structure against steganalysis techniques while ensuring critical security parameters.