An investigation into the application of linear feedback shift registers for steganography

Steganography is the art (as well as the science) of hiding information inside other innocuous data such that the very existence of the secret message is concealed from the eyes of the world. One of the techniques used in steganography to hide data behind images is called the least-significant bit (LSB) insertion wherein the LSB of each byte of the pixel of the image's raster data is replaced with the single bit of the data to be hidden. This is based on the premise that the total number of bit-changes in the image's raster data will be so small that the resulting stego-image will be indistinguishable to the human eye from the original image. In this paper, we propose to use random bit-sequences generated by linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) within the pixel-byte (instead of just the LSB) for the purpose of steganography. It is believed that such changes within any given pixel of the image will result in better hiding of the data and hence more secure data transmission.