Abstract
Conventional steganography focuses on invisibility and undetectability, as the main concern is to make the algorithms immune to steganalysis. Zero-steg-anography is an imperceptible and undetectable data hiding technique as no change is made to the cover, hence not requiring any steganalysis. The proposed algorithm hides the payload based on certain relationship between the cover image, chaotic sequence and the payload, instead of directly embedding payload into the cover image which often leaves tell tale signs of steganography. Moreover, use of chaotic map in the process of data hiding provides improved security. Survivability of the proposed algorithm is analyzed against JPEG compression, noise and low-pass filtering attacks. Imperceptibility analysis reveals that the proposed algorithm is totally imperceptible regardless of the payload length. The proposed algorithm is also analyzed for security and is found to be secure, in highly compromised scenarios, where all except one of the key components required to retrieve payload are known to the adversary.