Secure Steganography Channel for Minimising Insider Threat

Abstract

Due to advances in information technology, businesses and organisations are increasingly storing, sharing and processing a large amount of critical information. This critical information involves privacy, reputation, financial issues, and consequently, their protection is a highly serious concern. One of the serious attacks against confidential information is data leakage which can be defined as the unauthorised transfer of classified information or data from computer or organisation to the outside world. In digital cybercrime, data leakage is a fast-growing threat to global security. The diversity of data leakage scenario attacks against confidential information is constantly growing phenomenon either from inside or outside the organisation, typically, along with their convenience and easy access and vice versa. This research study steganography as a means of exchanging secret information to deal with a specific scenario of data leakage. In the past ten years, information hiding techniques have gained much attention from information security area. They are used in many applications, and steganography is one of them. Digital steganography has the potential to be used for private and secure communications. Various multimedia carriers such as audio, text, video, image can act as cover media to carry secret information. This research particularly in image steganography, which typically employs image processing, image composition and decomposition, and signal transformation. The main objective of this work is to explore the potential of image steganography in a well-defined environment where the insider threats are the main danger for the secret information that needs to be protected through means of a communication network. It starts by explaining the main differences between the various information hiding techniques. This will be followed by the definition of the environment settings and the proposed methodology for using and exploring image steganography as a means of exchanging secret information. Finally, it applies a set of experiments to determine some current challenges of image steganography.