Abstract
The growing demand for secure digital communication has led to the necessity of developing strong schemes that can provide confidentiality, integrity, and information recovery. In general, traditional image encryption and steganography methods suffer from limitations due to the reduction in either embedding capacity or visual quality. In this paper, a novel scheme for secure reversible data hiding of an encrypted image based on the combination of Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2 (PBKDF2), Advanced Encryption Standard in Galois/Counter Mode (AES-GCM), and Most Significant Bit (MSB) embedding is introduced. In the first place, PBKDF2 uses a password chosen by the user to derive a secret key, which is used in order to encrypt the secret message using AES-GCM. Then, the generated ciphertext is embedded into the cover image via MSB substitution method. The experimental analysis performed with the help of USC-SIPI image database shows that the suggested scheme provides 52.36 dB PSNR, 0.45 MSE, 0.99 SSIM and 2.84 bpp embedding capacity.References
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Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Capsule Networks