A novel steganographic scheme using Sudoku

The word `Steganography' is derived from Greek words `stegos' meaning `cover' and `graphia' meaning `writing'. Steganography conceptually implies that the message to be transmitted is not visible to the normal eye. It is an art of hiding information inside a medium. The main objective of Steganography is mainly concerned with the protection of contents of the hidden information. A message in cipher text may arouse suspicion while an invisible message is not. A digital image is a flexible medium used to carry a secret message because the slight modification of a cover image is hard to distinguish by human eyes. In this paper, we have proposed a Steganographic scheme using Sudoku puzzle. The novelties of the work lies that nobody could be able to modify the cover image during transmission as well as the message is embedded using a Sudoku reference matrix.