A new steganographic approach over web addresses for a secure cyber communication

With the rapid growth of information technology and internet, security has become a critical issue. Therefore, data hiding gained importance for delivering secret messages. Data hiding techniques hide messages such as images, videos, texts, etc. A data hiding technique is different from cryptology. A cryptographic scheme encrypts the message and then the message is sent, which is more secure and unpredictable, to the receiver's side. Since the message has a meaningless and uncommon content, the communication makes the observer aware of the exchange, so there is always a threat from a malicious attacker. Steganography is the technique of providing communication where no one except the intended receiver knows about the existence of secret data. Successful steganography depends on the carrier medium not to raise attention. In this study, a steganographic scheme that employs URL of web pages, has been proposed. Images have been used as the carriers. LZW, Arithmetic coding and AES, DES, Blowfish, RSA encryption algorithms have been used to increase complexity, capacity of the proposed approach and to support the security. Experimental results showed that the proposed method is feasible for any communication between two parties. Since the communication is performed via only a web address, it does not raise suspicion in case of an observation.