An Efficient Data Security System Based on LSB Steganography and Symmetric Key Encryption

Abstract

The rapid growth of internet and ICT has led to increase the amount of exchanged information over the internet and as a result, the research of information security technique is becoming more and more important. Various methods including cryptography, steganography, coding, etc. are used for protecting important information. Cryptography is the process of changing the original information into unreadable from, while Steganography is the process of hiding secret information in a cover media such as image or sound. In this paper, a new image steganography and encryption scheme is proposed. First, the secret message is hidden inside a cover image, and then the resulted steganographic image is encrypted. The main advantages of the proposed scheme are represented in the use of steganography and cryptography techniques respectively providing a high level of security since breaking cryptosystem depends on breaking its encryption and decryption key. The key is randomly generated in a form of binary matrix which makes it very hard even impossible to be broken. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme in this paper has a high security level and better image stego-image quality.