A Comparative Performance Study of WebP Compression in a Cryptographic–Steganographic Pipeline for Secure E-Commerce Transactions

The expeditious growth of electronic commerce (e-commerce) fundamentally transformed business operations and consumer behavior by enabling businesses to reach a global market, streamline supply chains, and provide personalized shopping experiences. This shift necessitated reliable security measures to protect sensitive information during online transactions. However, existing approaches that combined encryption, steganography, and conventional compression techniques such as DCT and autoencoders were limited in preserving image quality and computational efficiency. To address this gap, the objective of this study was to integrate WebP compression into the cryptographic–steganographic pipeline in order to improve image quality, ensure payload integrity, and achieve efficiency suitable for real-time e-commerce systems. While cryptographic–steganographic pipelines combining asymmetric encryption, spatial embedding, and compression are well established, this study focused on demonstrating the comparative performance benefits of WebP compression over existing approaches such as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and autoencoders. To achieve this, an enhanced model was developed and evaluated by integrating the ElGamal cryptosystem for encryption, Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography for embedding, and WebP for compression and optimization. In the developed workflow, transaction data was encrypted using ElGamal, embedded into cover images with LSB steganography, compressed using WebP, and at the receiver’s end the images were decoded, the ciphertext was extracted, and decrypted with the private key to recover the original data. This process ensured confidentiality, efficiency, and reliability in e-commerce communication. Empirical evaluation was conducted using key performance metrics, including Mean Squared Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and entropy. Results showed low MSE values, PSNR values exceeding 79 dB, SSIM scores of 0.9999, and minimal entropy loss, confirming both high image quality retention and strong payload integrity. These results demonstrate that the developed model achieved superior image quality, high structural fidelity, zero payload errors, and efficient performance, confirming its suitability for securing sensitive e-commerce transactions. Compared with the base work of Kumbhakar et al. [36], which reported a PSNR of 54.9 dB, the developed WebP-based model demonstrated a significant improvement in image quality and efficiency. These findings established that while the cryptographic–steganographic pipeline itself was not novel, the integration of WebP compression provided superior performance compared to traditional DCT-based methods. The developed model therefore offered a practical and effective solution for safeguarding sensitive e-commerce transactions, addressing threats such as data interception, unauthorized access, and Man-in-the-Middle attacks.