A Smart Strategy for Data Hiding using Cryptography and Steganography

Confidential data maintained by Security sources has always been a substantial aspect of hampering unintended access. Technology is enhancing day by day towards information, especially in terms of multimedia file transmission. Combining cryptography and steganography, a crossover approach serves information security. Cryptography is a strategy for changing over from plain content Cipher Text. Steganography is the specialty of concealing plain text, which refers to hiding data within a message or file. The proposed method provides a hybridsystem in designing and utilizing cryptography and steganography techniques, making the communication system reliable in resisting attacks. In this paper, the play fair cipher method is used to encode the hidden textual content, which provides security in terms of effective level. Play fair cipher represents the plain text as a data unit and converts these units into unknown forms. Later, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Logical Operation Exclusive OR (XOR) techniques were combined with masking encrypted messages inside the picture. Noble security level results and histogram analysis are the achievements' values that indicate the offers designed by a system.