The Art of Data Hiding with Reed-Solomon Error Correcting Codes

With the tremendous advancements in technology and the Internet, data security has become a major issue around the globe. To guarantee that data is protected and does not go to an unintended endpoint, the art of data hiding (steganography) emerged. Steganography is the art of hiding information such that it is not detectable to the naked eye. Various techniques have been proposed for hiding a secret message in a carrier document. In this paper, we present a novel design that applies Reed-Solomon (RS) error correcting codes in steganographic applications. The model works by substituting the redundant RS codes with the steganographic message. The experimental results show that the proposed design is satisfactory with the percentage of decoded information 100% and percentage of decoded secret message 97. 36%. The proposed model proved that it could be applied in various steganographic applications.