<![CDATA[In the exchange of information over the Internet, message confidentiality is an important aspect because messages may be accessed by unauthorized parties. One technique used to protect message confidentiality is steganography, which conceals a message within another medium so that its existence remains unnoticed. The End of File (EoF) method is capable of preserving image quality; however, it may increase the file size after the embedding process. This study aims to address this limitation by utilizing the padding bits of 24-bit bitmap images as a message embedding medium and applying Huffman coding compression to improve storage efficiency. The system was tested using 15 text messages and 10 different 24-bit bitmap images. The results show that Huffman compression is effective for messages of certain lengths, whereas compression becomes less efficient for very short messages due to the overhead required to store the message header and Huffman code table. Fidelity testing produced an MSE value of 0 and an infinite PSNR value, indicating that the stego image is identical to the cover image because no pixel values are modified during the embedding process. This is possible because the secret data are stored in a memory area that does not contribute to the visual representation of the image. Furthermore, the embedded messages were successfully extracted and decompressed without any alteration when the stego images remained unmodified. However, robustness testing showed that the messages could not be recovered after the images were rotated by 90° or 180°, as changes in the bitmap data structure caused the loss of data stored in the padding bits.]]>
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