Comparative Analysis of Impact of Steganography and Crypto-Stego on Network Performance

Backgrounds: The impact of digital image steganography (stego) and crypto-steganography (crypto-stego) on network performance has not been adequately examined. The major objective of this research is to compare the impacts of both on latency, transfer time, and throughput. Minor objectives include determination of the relationship between payload ratio and data size, latency, and throughput, as well as effect of AES-256 encryption on size of plaintext data. Materials and methods: A virtual network was set up using EVE-NG. OpenStego was used for encryption and embedding of data. Two sets of data, each ranging from 100 to 900 kilobytes in size, were transmitted through the network. The data sets were classified into digital image steganography (stego) and crypto-steganography (crypto-stego). The former contained plaintext while the latter had AES-256 encrypted cipher text. The increase in size of plaintext after encryption was noted. Latency, transfer time, and throughput were recorded using Netperf. Pearson correlation and t-test of two independent means were used in statistical analysis. Results: Crypto-stego has a higher latency, transfer time and throughput than digital image steganography. Reasons for the discrepancy have been offered in the write up. However, the size of the embedded data has strong, statistically significant (p < 0.05), positive correlation with each of the three network performance matrices. Payload ratio has a perfect linear relationship with data size and strong, highly statistically significant (<0.01), positive correlation with latency and throughput. Both plaintext and cipher text had essentially equal data size. Conclusion: Users of crypto-stego should expect to enjoy enhanced data security but poor network performance. The perfect linear relationship between payload ratio and data size facilitated the estimation of maximum data size with low imperceptibility risk. AES-256 encryption has a negligible effect on plaintext data size.