Secret images transfer in cloud system based on investigating quantum walks in steganography approaches

The central role of the cloud data warehouse is to ensure the security of confidential data that can be achieved via techniques of steganography and cryptography. Amidst the growth of quantum computation, modern data security tools may be cracked because of its structure based on mathematical computations. Quantum walk (QW) acts as a vital role in designing quantum algorithms, which is a universal computational model. Therefore, we allocate the advantages of QWs to design a QWs-based novel image steganography mechanism for cloud systems, which the embedding/extraction process for the secret object is based on quantum concepts. The presented technique has three algorithms of image steganography. The core idea for presenting these algorithms is to embed the sensitive object into the host media without a pre-encryption process for the secret data, which its security and embedding procedures are entirely based on quantum walks. As well opens the door for quantum technologies to be combined with information hiding techniques to achieve better security. The presented technique uses gray-scale or color images as a confidential object to be hidden into the carrier image, as well the embedded object can be any data, e.g. text or audio files and not restricted to image files. Security analysis and experimental results confirm that the suggested algorithms have good visual quality and high-security based on QWs as well high embedding capacity. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.