A new approach to relatively short message steganography
The rapid growth of Internet users and the increasing range of data types which are exchanged over this network (video, audio, text messages...), emphasize the security problem that this way of communication has. The flood of multimedia contents in the structure of transmitted data has made the appearance of images in this network quite normal. This revived the use of steganography (hiding data within images) in order to hide information to avoid unauthorized access. A much used technique for this purpose, the LSB (Least Significant Bits) technique, still leads to visible changes in the original image, which was chosen to be the message carrier. These differences make quite a path for a cryptanalyst to doubt the authenticity (independence) of the picture itself. However, by using GA (Genetic Algorithm), the differences between the original image and the image embedded with secret data can be reduced. However, the difference between the original image and the image with embedded information still remains, while the achieved improvements are paid with an increase of computational complexity. Naturally a question arises: Can the image be embedded with information in a way so that it does not undergo any changes? Most fast responses would be that it is not possible. This paper shows that this is in fact possible.