Abstract
Data encryption and steganography algorithms are heavily used in current systems to achieve data confidentiality. This paper presents a comprehensive Defensive/Offensive (DefOff) system that offers different hiding technologies and encryption algorithms, whether symmetric or asymmetric, to ensure the secrecy of the transmitted data, whether this data is benign or malicious. Furthermore, DefOff gives the developers and researchers a choice to hide the data only or encrypt then hide to add another level of security. The main contributions of DefOff are (a) the ability to integrate any hiding or encryption technology within the same platform, (b) embedding any type of secret data, (c) providing comprehensive evaluation metrics to assess the performance of the executed algorithms, (d) choosing the best combination of techniques for users' solutions based on their requirements, (e) offering DefOff services in terms of a user-friendly Python-based graphical user interface (GUI) tool. As a case study, this paper presents image steganography hiding scheme based on Least Significant Bit (LSB) and Pixel Value Differencing (PVD) algorithms. DefOff shows how LSB and PVD can hide the secret data within digital color images without encryption or after applying symmetric or asymmetric encryption. Additionally, a recent hiding approach has also been integrated with DefOff for comparison purposes. Different objective evaluation metrics were calculated to test the performance of all deployed hiding approaches. The experiment results obtained from DefOff prove the superior performance of the hiding systems to achieve high security, robustness, and imperceptibility.