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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reversible data hiding (RDH) is crucial in modern data security, ensuring confidentiality and tamper-proofness in various industries like copyright protection, medical imaging, and digital forensics. As technology advances, RDH techniques become essential, but the trade-off between embedding capacity and visual quality must be heeded. In this paper, the relative correlation between the pixel's local complexity and its directional prediction error is employed to enhance an efficient RDH without using a location map. An embedding process based on multiple cumulative peak region localization (MCPRL) is proposed to hide information in the 3D-directional prediction error histogram with a lower local complexity value and avoid the underflow/overflow problems. The carrier image is divided into three color channels, and then each channel is split into two non-overlapping sets: blank and shadow. Two half-directional prediction errors (the blank set and the shadow set) are constructed to generate a full-directional prediction error for each color channel belonging to the host image. The local complexity value and directional prediction error are critical metrics in the proposed embedding process to improve security and robustness. By utilizing these metrics to construct a 3D stego-Blank Set, the 3D stego-shadow Set will be subsequently constructed using the 3D blank set. The proposed technique outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques in terms of embedding capacity, image quality, and robustness against attacks without an extra location map. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for various 3D RDH techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]