Personal Social Network Profile Authentication Through Image Steganography

In the era of digital communication and social networking, the authenticity and integrity of personal social network profiles have become crucial for establishing trust and ensuring secure interactions. Existing methods often suffer from vulnerabilities like password theft, identity impersonation, and data breaches. To overcome these challenges, the paper introduces a new steganography method as a robust solution, leveraging the concept of hiding information within seemingly innocent digital cover image. The proposed methodology involves embedding unique and imperceptible authentication data within profile images. This scheme is developed using shell matrix and absolute-moment block-truncation coding (AMBTC) compression. The shell matrix is used for concealing the private information and AMBTC compression is applied to compress large data files into smaller ones, which can speed up network transmission of compressed code. By exploiting the redundancy in image data, the authentication data is embedded in a manner that is indistinguishable to human observers. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, extensive experiments were conducted using real-world social network profiles. The results demonstrate the ability of the proposed technique to successfully embed and extract authentication data while preserving the visual quality of the profile images.