HtStego as a Utility Used for Halftone Steganography

Abstract

Steganography is the practice of hiding confidential information inside apparently harmless media, and it plays a vital role in ensuring secure communication and safeguarding data. This chapter presents a steganography program that is both free and open-source. It allows users to hide plaintext payloads inside halftone photographs. Additionally, the software includes a utility for extracting these payloads from images that were created using the steganography tool. One notable characteristic of this utility is its ability to distribute payloads over many outputs, which increases payload security by preventing illegal extraction and eliminates the need for the original picture during payload retrieval. In addition, the utility offers quantitative evaluations of picture quality for the generated images. These evaluations are used in this study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the steganography approach being discussed.