CamouFlair - Hybrid Steganography for Short Secure Messaging

Nowadays, it is difficult to send information secretly on the Internet. Normally, the data involved in that communication will go through a long path before arriving at the desired destination. Because of that, there is a high possibility of someone monitoring the communication, trying to gain benefit out of the information being passed around. Although, there are already many security systems being developed, even now, it is just a matter of time before they are exposed. Therefore, this study proposes a new steganography method to supplement the effort of providing secure messaging. The proposed method will be based on a hybrid steganography method consisting of image and text steganography. Before being embedded, the message will be encrypted using symmetric key encryption namely AES. Next, the encrypted message will be embedded into a list of verse names of Quran. Sequentially, the result from that process will then be embedded into a cover image through custom implementation of Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) which will produce a stegofile, ready to be transported to the receiver. Through the testing done, it can be concluded that the implementation done in this study is comparable to those of the existing implementation of DCT for short message.