DIGITAL DATA PROTECTION USING STEGANOGRAPHY

• Main Authors: R. Rejani, D. Murugan, Deepu V. Krishnan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu 2016-03-01
• Series: ICTACT Journal on Communication Technology
• Subjects: Data protection; Steganography; Stego Image; Cover Image; Software Protection; Encipher; AES; SteganoDB; LSB
• Online Access: http://ictactjournals.in/paper/IJCT_V7_I1_paper4_1245_1254.pdf

In today’s digital world applications from a computer or a mobile device consistently used to get every kind of work done for professional as well as entertainment purpose. However, one of the major issue that a software publisher will face is the issue of piracy. Throughout the last couple of decades, almost all-major or minor software has been pirated and freely circulated across the internet. The impact of the rampant software piracy has been huge and runs into billions of dollars every year. For an independent developer or a programmer, the impact of piracy will be huge. Huge companies that make specialized software often employ complex hardware methods such as usage of dongles to avoid software piracy. However, this is not possible to do for a normal independent programmer of a small company. As part of the research, a new method of software protection that does not need proprietary hardware and other complex methods are proposed in this paper. This method uses a combination of inbuilt hardware features as well as steganography and encryption to protect the software against piracy. The properties or methods used include uniqueness of hardware, steganography, strong encryption like AES and geographic location. To avoid hacking the proposed framework also makes use of self-checks in a random manner. The process is quite simple to implement for any developer and is usable on both traditional PCs as well as mobile environments.