Secure map-based crypto-stego technique based on mac address

Steganography and cryptography are spy craft cousins, working differently to achieve the same target. Cryptography is perceptible and observable without understanding the real content, while steganography hides the content so that it is not perceptible or observable and without producing noticeable changes to the carrier image. The challenge is finding the right balance between security and retrievability of embedded data from embedding locations without increasing the required embedded information. This paper proposes a secure map-based steganography technique to enhance the message security level based on the sender and recipient mac addresses. The proposed technique uses rivest-shamir-adleman (RSA) to encrypt the message, then embeds the cipher message in the host image based on the sender and recipient media access control addresses (mac addresses) exclusive or operation "XOR" results without increasing the required embedded information for the embedding location map. The proposed technique is evaluated on various metrics, including peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and embedding capacity, and the results show that it provides a high level of security and robustness against attacks without an extra location map. The proposed technique can embed more data up to 196.608 KB in the same image with a PSNR higher than 50.58 dB.