Image Protection against Forgery and Pixel Tampering based on a Triple Hybrid Security Approach

Due to the widespread of advanced digital imaging devices, forgery of digital images became more serious attack patterns. In this attack scenario, the attacker tries to manipulate the digital image to conceal some meaningful information of the genuine image for malicious purposes. This leads to increase security interest about protecting images against integrity tampers. This paper proposes a novel technique for protecting colored images against forgery and pixel tamper. The proposed approach is designed as a hybrid model from three security techniques, Message Digest hashing algorithm (MD5), Advanced Encryption Standard-128 bits (AES), and Stenography. The proposed approach has been evaluated using set of image quality metrics for testing the impact of embedding the protection code on image quality. The evaluation results proved that protecting image based on Least Significant Bit (LSB) is the best technique that keep image quality compared with other two bit-substitution methods. Moreover, the results proved the superiority of the proposed approach compared with other technique in the literature.