An Application of Palette Based Steganography

Steganography is the art of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one; apart from the sender and intended recipient even understand there is a hidden message. Steganography includes the concealment of information within computer files. One of the most common methods of implementation is Least Significant Bit Insertion, in which the least significant bit of every byte is altered to form the bit-string representing the embedded file. Altering the LSB will only cause minor changes in color. While this technique works well for 24-bit color image files, steganography has not been as successful when using an 8-bit color image file, due to limitations in color variations and the use of a color table. Color table is organized asthe first three bytes correspond to RGB components and the last byte is reserved or unused. The proposed technique is to generate the image from a 24-bit bitmap to an 8-bit bitmap using color quantization resulted in minor variations in the image, which are barely noticeable to the human eye. However, these slight variations aid in hiding the data.