A Secure, Multi-Format System for Covert Communication: Implementing Adaptive LSB Steganography With End-to- End Aes Encryption

Steganography is a crucial technique in information security, enabling covert communication by concealing a secret message within an innocuous carrier file, thus fundamentally differing from visible cryptographic methods. This paper introduces SilentPixels, an advanced, web-based framework engineered for highly secure data concealment across diverse multimedia formats, including images, audio, video, and documents. The core of the system leverages the Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution technique, utilizing a format-specific adaptive capacity calculator that dynamically adjusts payload size, which reduces statistical detectability by 40% compared to conventional static allocation methods. Security is significantly enhanced through a dual-layer strategy that incorporates military-grade AES-256-GCM encryption with PBKDF2 key derivation, ensuring the hidden payload is rendered unusable even if extracted without the correct key. Experimental validation confirms the system's robustness across various file types, demonstrating a 98.3% decoding accuracy and achieving a 1.2x performance boost for cryptographic operations through WebAssembly optimization. SilentPixels provides a practical, scalable, and highly secure solution for private digital data transfer in complex modern environments.