Joint Transaction-Image Steganography for High Capacity Covert Communication

• Published in: 2019 International Conference on Computer, Control, Informatics and its Applications (IC3INA) pp. 41 - 46
• Main Authors: Basuki, Akbari Indra, Rosiyadi, Didi
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-10-2019
• Subjects: Blockchain; Communication; Electronic mail; Encoding; Logic gates; Manuals; Secret; Smart contracts; Steganography; Transaction; Uniform resource locators
• DOI: 10.1109/IC3INA48034.2019.8949606

Conventional secret communications suffer from communication channel insecurity and lack of secrecy. Blockchain-based steganography comes up by proposing secure communication channel with the expense of low message capacity. In this paper, we propose joint steganography by utilizing blockchain-based transaction steganography and image steganography to achieve both advantages: a secure and secret communication medium that also possess a high capacity. We use image steganography to store the real hidden message while transaction steganography stores only the instruction manual to retrieve the stegano-image. We proposed group encoding and multi-field embedding to improve the capacity and robustness of transaction steganography. As a result, the joint method can achieve a high message capacity of ≈ 759 KB. The method also retaining the natural transaction pattern without generating anomalous transactions number.