Grey level modification steganography for secret communication

Security, privacy, anti-virus, trusted computing, intrusion detection and information protection are major concerns in today's industrial informatics. They are regarded as critical components for industrial based IT solutions (Zincheng, N et al.,2003). Most industrial software systems rely on the third party vendors to provide the safeguards. This approach in turn brings up a major issue regarding the trust of the third parties. We often see that in one industrial system, there may be several other parties' trustees in order to provide all the security needs, in this paper, we describe an approach that can provide security and information protection through steganography, without a need for third party trustees. We present a steganographic algorithm, which is an information hiding technique which allows secret communication, to cover and recover hidden information within the spatial domain of the image. It has low computational complexity and high information hiding capacity. The principle behind the algorithm is to embed information by modifying the grey level values of the grey scale image pixels. We demonstrate this method by giving examples as proof of the concepts