Reversible Information Hiding in Ciphertext of Any Digital Media

Reversible data hiding in encrypted media (RDH-EM) plays a dual role in information security and data processing, especially in cloud services. Without accessing the visual or auditory content of digital media, additional information can be hidden in encrypted data. The recipient can not only extract the information but also recover the media losslessly while maintaining confidentiality. Most existing RDH-EM techniques focus on images as host carrier, which cannot be extended to other types of digital media; Some techniques are bound only to specific encryption algorithms. In this paper, we propose a universal RDH-EM technique independent of the types of media and encryption algorithm. The payload of data hiding is as high as the amount of host ciphertext data. Although data hiding is associated with the ciphertext data of host media, it does not affect the recovery of original media at all. Experimental results confirm the performance superiority of the proposed technique.