Novel Approach for Hiding Secret Data in Image Using Cryptic Steganography

Security is an important issue related to the storage and communication of data and information. In data and information security, cryptography and steganography are two of the most common security techniques. Transfer of critical information is also being carried out through the Internet. This widespread use of the Internet coupled with the tremendous growth in e-commerce and m-commerce has created a vital need for information security. Internet has also become an active field of crackers and intruders. It is, hence a challenge before the professional community to develop systems to ensure security of the data sent through the Internet. Here we describe a method for integrating together cryptography and steganography through image processing. In particular, we present a system able to perform steganography and cryptography at the same time using images as cover objects for steganography and as keys for cryptography. In this new approach, encrypt the original text message letter by letter applying a function, which involves certain mathematical operation using corresponding letters and also numbers from the original image, and then we use highly secure encryption using Double - EHDES algorithm to encrypt the message. For encryption we need to use secret key for plain text M and Triple - EHDES encryption function. A new steganography approach for data hiding is proposed. This approach uses the Least Significant Bits (LSB) insertion to hide data within encrypted image data. The binary representation of the hidden data is used to overwrite the LSB of each byte within the encrypted image randomly.