Protecting Digital Documents in E-Learning: A Novel Ownership Verification Mechanism Using Steganography and QR Codes

COVID-19 has created the worst crisis for businesses worldwide, particularly in the education and learning industries. During the Covid-19 pandemic, most learning institutions will have to use the digital environment to communicate knowledge and skills to their learners. E-Learning Management System is used to share learning resources in form of digital documents for the teaching and learning process. However, digital documents are vulnerable to unlawful reproduction and distribution. Thus, it is necessary to safeguard and establish document ownership. Based on this reason, this paper proposes a mechanism to safeguard and confirm ownership of documents using the steganography technique embedded in QR code technology. The main objective of this study is to design and implement a mechanism that can securely embed ownership and acquisition information into digital documents. The scope of this study is limited to embedding and verifying ownership information; it does not address broader cybersecurity controls such as full document encryption or digital rights management. In the proposed mechanism, information related to the documents such as the owner and the person who acquired the document is concealed using the steganography technique and embedded in QR Code. A prototype is developed and tested based on the criteria of completeness, usability, and imperceptibility parameters to verify the effectiveness of the mechanism. The result indicates that the proposed mechanism can confirm the ownership and protect the documents from any misused activities such as being distributed on a public platform without the owner’s consent.