Coverless and Databaseless Steganography Using XOR Gate Operation

Steganography is a type of information hiding that uses an image as a cover for actual information whether it is text, image, and video. Images that have embedded data are known as stego-images. Traditional image steganography, such as the LSB scheme, will leave traces of changes in the pixels of the stego-image, and can usually be detected by the steganalysis scheme. Recently, there has been a great discussion about steganography, namely the coverless steganography scheme. Coverless does not mean that there is no cover image, but that there is no pixel change in the cover image. It means that the cover image and stego-image are the same and that no changes are made to the cover image. The cover image itself carries the message that is trying to be sent to the receiver. This paper proposes a new coverless image steganography method using a hash sequence, and XOR gate operation is driven by a secret message. This method does not need a large-scale image database (databaseless) and is resistant to steganalysis tools because no changes are made to the cover image to store the bit stream. The cover image will be divided into small block images. Then each image block will be calculated with intensity value, then each intensity value is compared to the next value to form a hash sequence. After that, the hash sequence will be mapped to the bit value of bitstream (payload) using XOR gate operation. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a high embedded capacity and robustness in common attacks such as rescaling and noise adding.