Htstego: a Halftone Steganography Utility

Abstract

Steganography, the art and science of concealing secret information within seemingly innocent cover media, is crucial in secure information exchange and data protection. This work introduces a free and open -source steganography software for concealing plaintext payloads within halftone images, accompanied by a payload extraction utility to retrieve payloads from images generated using the featured utility. The utility can compress the payload before hiding and generate color and binary stego halftone images via a selection of methods, including ordered dithering and error diffusion, with support for custom-defined error diffusion kernels. A distinguishing feature of the utility is the distribution of payloads across multiple outputs to enhance payload security against unauthorized extraction and eliminate the necessity of the original image during payload extraction. Additionally, the utility provides quantitative assessments of image quality for the produced images, which is used in this paper to showcase the efficiency of the featured method.