Cryptography and image steganography using dynamic encryption on LSB and color image based data hiding

Abstract

Cryptography and steganography are two conventional techniques used to cipher or hide informationor data in existing communication. Cryptography is the art of saving information by encrypting it into anobscure format. On the other hand, steganography is the art and science of secret communication to sendmessages in a way which hides even the existence of the communication. In cryptography method, the messagesends in an incomprehensible form in order to only the recipient can remove the disguise to extract and readthe encrypted text. Conversely, in steganographic systems, the data embedded into a harmless digital mediafile like image, video, or audio and the file transmitted. Although cryptography and steganography provide anacceptable level of security when used separately via communicating in the unreliable medium like the Internet,advancesin steganalysis make it a constantly evolving field. This paper aims to improve a new scheme of hiding a secret message in an image, by exploiting the benefits of combining cryptography and steganography.A new proposed encryption method is combined and tested with two steganographic methods separately inorder to show and prove its performance and effectiveness. The two steganographic methods are Simple LSBand color image based data hiding (CIBDH). Experimental results are then evaluated in terms of imperceptibility,capacity and robustness. Results achieved indicate that the two proposed DELSB and DECIBDH methods areencouraging in terms of security, capacity and robustness.