Securing the H.323 Protocol: A Steganographic and Hybrid Encryption Approach

Most. Mazriha Akter Mohua¹

Section:Research Paper, Product Type: Journal-Paper
Vol.12 , Issue.6 , pp.26-35, Dec-2024

Online published on Dec 31, 2024

Copyright © Most. Mazriha Akter Mohua . This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 

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Abstract :
An empirical investigation has established a novel approach for secure data transfer via the H.323 protocol by combining hybrid cryptography and real-time steganography. It has been found that the H.323 protocol vulnerabilities, such as vulnerability in NAT implementation in CISCO IOS, NAT slipstreaming, out-of-bounds memory write flaw, etc., allow attackers to send malformed H.323 traffic to execute a Denial of Service (DoS) or buffer overflow attack. This compromises security by causing resource exhaustion, session table consumption, and more. The proposed framework utilizes a hybrid cryptography algorithm that combines multi-layer symmetric encryption with the asymmetric Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm, and a steganography technique that embeds the encrypted data in the 3rd LSBs of the pixels of a real-time video stream. This allows for multilevel security for data transmitted via H.323. This study also outlines a mechanism for categorizing transmitted data into Unicode and Non-Unicode using machine learning algorithms to ensure data integrity. However, the study’s scope is limited to excluding alternative data transmission methods or protocols. A more comprehensive examination could provide a better understanding of how the proposed approach adapts to diverse data formats. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that the hybrid algorithm optimizes both speed and memory usage compared with previous approaches. The proposed algorithm maintains the quality of the video stream. A low-latency connection and fast extraction with minimal distortion of the signal were feasible with increased Internet speed. By utilizing the machine learning model for error detection and increasing efficiency, the study achieves an accuracy of 99.21%. This research introduces a new framework to enhance privacy, circumvent attackers, increase payload capacity, and improve operating efficiency while reducing computing overhead. This makes it a practical solution for securely transferring data using the H.323 protocol.

Key-Words / Index Term :
Steganography, H.323 Protocol, Multi-Layer Encryption, Hybrid Cryptography, Real-time Steganography, RSA, LSB, Video Stream

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