A Secure Encrypted Steganographic Framework Using BLAKE3-Based Stream Encryption with LWT for Confidential Image Communication.
Main Article Content
Abstract
The proliferation of digital communication has led to the need to transmit confidential multimedia information securely at a high rate. Classic cryptographic schemes like AES, ChaCha20, and SNOW-V are designed aimed at data confidentiality only and do not hide the presence of the transmitted data. On the other hand, the conventional image steganography methods are those techniques of hiding secret information into digital images, but the embedded data is easy to be detected. Thus, combining the two techniques of encryption and steganography is a viable approach to improve communication security.
In this research, a new encrypted picture steganography scheme is suggested using Modified Dynamic Key Stream 256 (MDKS-256) encryption algorithm and Lifting Wavelet Transform (LWT). The proposed MDKS-256 architecture is a new dynamic state-update mechanism that includes three novel modifications: the use of BLAKE3 for master key generation, the adaptive rotation, the nonlinear mixing, the dynamic generation of round constant, the parallel update of the state, and the dynamic generation of the keystream. The proposed encryption engine uses 16 rounds of transformation, which leads to which is designed to improve diffusion and provide stronger empirical sensitivity to key and nonce perturbations.
In proposed architecture for data hiding is based on Lifting Wavelet Transform that disintegrates and split the image into the LL, LH, HL, and HH frequency sub-bands. The bit stream is encrypted then adaptively embedded in the HL sub-band for high embedding capacity and excellent visual quality. The integer-to-integer property of LWT guarantees lossless reconstruction, low computation complexity and better imperceptibility than the traditional DWT-based methods.
Standard benchmark image datasets are employed to evaluate the proposed framework and standard image processing techniques are implemented to analyze it with PSNR, SSIM, MSE, entropy, histogram uniformity, NPCR, UACI, correlation coefficient, embedding capacity, and execution time. Experimental evaluation demonstrates high embedding fidelity and favourable statistical characteristics under the evaluated benchmark conditions, while the key/nonce sensitivity, differential analysis, round-count ablation, and selected NIST SP 800-22 tests provide empirical evidence regarding the behaviour of the proposed construction.
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