Reversible data-hiding-through-encryption scheme using rotated stream cipher

Abstract

Research into the domain of reversible data-hiding has received a great deal of attention in recent years due to its wide applications in medical image transmission and cloud computing. Reversible data-hiding during image encryption is a recently emerged framework for hiding secret data in an image during the image-encryption process. In this manuscript, we propose a new reversible data-hiding-through-encryption scheme that will ensure a high embedding rate without bringing any additional overhead of key handling. The proposed algorithm can use any secure symmetric encryption scheme, and the encryption and/or decryption key should be shared with the receiver for data extraction and image recovery. As per the proposed scheme, the data hider can hide threebits of a secret message in an image block of a size of B x B pixels. The data extraction and image recovery will be carried out by analyzing the closeness between adjacent pixels. The simulation of the new scheme carried out on the USC-SIPI dataset shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the well-known existing schemes in terms of embedding rates and bit error rates.