Reversible data hiding in an encrypted image using the homomorphic property of elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) schemes have recently gained much interest in protecting the secret information and sensitive cover images. For cloud security applications, the third party’s data embedding can be done (e.g., cloud service). In such a scenario, to protect the cover image from unauthorized access, it is essential to encrypt before embedding it. It can be overcome by combining the RDH scheme with encryption. However, the key challenge in integrating RDH with encryption is that the correlation between adjacent pixels begins to disappear after encryption, so reversibility cannot be accomplished. RDH with elliptic curve cryptography is proposed to overcome this challenge. In this paper (ECC-RDH) by adopting additive homomorphism property; the proposed method, the stego image decryption gives the sum of the original image and confidential data. The significant advantages of this method are, the cover image is transferred with high security, the embedding capacity is 0.5 bpp with a smaller location map size of 0.05 bpp. The recovered image and secrets are the same as in the original, and thus 100% reversibility is proved.