Secure Data Hiding by Optimal Placement ofQueen Along Closed Knight Tour

Abhishek Bansal*, Sunil Kumar Muttoo**, Vinay Kumar***
* Assistant professor, Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, Amarkantak , Madhya Pradesh, India.
** Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Delhi, Delhi, India.
*** Professor, Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, GGSIPU, Delhi, India.
Periodicity:June - August'2015
DOI : https://doi.org/10.26634/jit.4.3.3487

Abstract

A knight tour starts from any square of the chessboard. A tour in which a knight visits every square on the board exactly once is called closed knight tour. A queen can move along column, row and diagonal in both forward and backward direction. In proposed method, the authors divide the cover image into non-overlapping 8x8 pixel blocks. For each block, they place a queen on a square and find the number of prime attacking positions by the queen along knight tour. Then the authors remove these attacking positions from the sequence of knight tour in 8x8 bytes block. They compute number of mismatches between bits in LSB position in 8×8 bytes blocks and corresponding number of bits from encrypted message to be hidden. The queen position that results in minimum distortion is chosen. The process is applied on each block in the cover image. The queen positions determined during embedding phase is recorded as the key and the same is used to extract the hidden message from stego cover. Experimental results performed on different images reveal that this method maintains high degree of imperceptibility. Randomization achieved through knight tour and queen moves provide another level of security against detection.

Keywords

Steganography, Knight tour, 8-Queens problem, Least Significant Bit (LSB), Steganalysis.

How to Cite this Article?

Bansal, A., Muttoo, S. K., and Kumar, V. (2015). Secure Data Hiding by Optimal Placement of Queen Along Closed Knight Tour. i-manager’s Journal on Information Technology, 4(3), 18-24. https://doi.org/10.26634/jit.4.3.3487

References

[1]. Amirtharajan, R. & Rayappan, J. B. B., (2012). An intelligent chaotic embedding approach to enhance stego-image quality, Information Sciences Vol. 193, pp. 115-124
[2]. Bajaj, R., Bedi, P. & Pal, S. K., (2010). Best hiding capacity scheme for variable length messages using particle swarm optimization, In Swarm, Evolutionary and Memetic Computing, pp. 230-237. Springer Berlin, Heidelberg.
[3]. Bansal A., Muttoo S. K.., Kumar V., (In Press). Secure Data Hiding along Randomly Selected Closed Knight Tour, International Journal of Applied Security Research, Taylor & Francis, Vol. 10, No. 4.
[4]. Borrell, R. (2009), A Brute Force Approach to Solving the Knights Tour Problem Using Prolog, In IC-AI, pp. 600- 604.
[5]. Chan, C. K., & Cheng, L. M., (2004) Hiding data in images by simple LSB substitution, Pattern recognition, Vol. 37, No. 3, 469-474
[6]. Douglas, M., (2014). Ants playing chess and finding new solution to old problem, Popular Science, USA
[7]. Dumitrescu, S., Wu, X., & Wang, Z. (2003). Detection of LSB steganography via sample pair analysis, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 51, No. 7, 1995- 2007
[8]. Fridrich, J., Goljan, M., & Soukal, D. (2006). Wet paper codes with improved embedding efficiency. In Electronic Imaging 2006, pp 607215-607215, International Society for Optics and Photonics
[9]. Hoalkar, G. L., (2004). “The prime queen attack problem”, http://www.cadaeic.net/primeq.htm
[10]. Iranpour, M., & Safabakhsh, R., (2014). Reducing the embedding impact in steganography using Hamiltonian paths and writing on wet paper, Multimedia Tools and Applications, 99. 1-14
[11]. Ker, A. D., & Böhme, R., (2008, February) Revisiting weighted stego-image steganalysis. In Electronic Imaging 2008, pp. 681905-681905, International Society for Optics and Photonics
[12]. Kumar, S., & Muttoo, S. K., (2013). A comparative study of image steganography in wavelet domain, International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Computing Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 91-101
[13]. Löbbing, M., & Wegener, I., (1996). The number of knight's tours equals 33,439,123,484,294—counting with binary decision diagrams. The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 3(1), R5
[14]. McKay, B. D., (1997). Knight's tours of an 8× 8 chessboard, Tech Rpt TR-CS-97-03, Dept Computer Science, Australian National University
[15]. Mielikainen, J., (2006). LSB matching revisited. Signal Processing Letters, IEEE, Vol. 13, No. 5, 285-287
[16]. Muttoo, S. K., Kumar, V. & Bansal, A,, (2012). Secure Data Hiding Using Eight Queens Solutions, International Journal of Information Security & Privacy, USA, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp 55-70.
[17]. Muttoo, S. K., & Kumar, S. (2008). A mulltilayred secure, robust and high capacity image steganographic algorithm. World of Computer Science and Information Technology Journal, 2221-0741.
[18]. Muttoo, S. K., & Kumar, S. (2009). Data hiding in JPEG images, International Journal of Information Technology (IJIT), Vol. 1, pp. 13-16.
[19]. Petitcolas, F.A.P., Anderson, R.J., Kuhn, M.G., (1999). Information hiding– a survey. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Special Issue on Identification and Protection of Multimedia Content, Vol. 87, pp. 1062–1078
[20]. Thanikaiselvan, V., Arulmozhivarman, P., Amirtharajan, R., and Rayappan, J. B. B., (2012). Horse riding & hiding in image for data guarding. Procedia Engineering, Vol. 30, pp. 36-44.
[21]. U.S. Army Infantry School, (1984), Combat skill of the soldier, FM 21-75, 1-1.
[22]. V. Kumar, Bansal A., & Muttoo S. K., (2014). Data Hiding Method Based on Inter-block difference in Eight queens Solutions and LSB Substitution”, International Journal of Information Security & Privacy, USA, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 42-52
[23]. Stallings, W., (1999). Cryptography & Network Security: principles and practices, Prentice Hall: USA
[24]. Zhang, X., & Wang, S., (2006). Efficient steganographic embedding by exploiting modification direction, Communications Letters, IEEE, Vol. 10, No. 11, 781-783
If you have access to this article please login to view the article or kindly login to purchase the article

Purchase Instant Access

Single Article

North Americas,UK,
Middle East,Europe
India Rest of world
USD EUR INR USD-ROW
Pdf 35 35 200 20
Online 35 35 200 15
Pdf & Online 35 35 400 25

Options for accessing this content:
  • If you would like institutional access to this content, please recommend the title to your librarian.
    Library Recommendation Form
  • If you already have i-manager's user account: Login above and proceed to purchase the article.
  • New Users: Please register, then proceed to purchase the article.