Enhanced information hiding using symmetric encryption techniques and least significant bits steganographic design approach

Abstract

The security of information on the network has been a major issue due to mass distribution of information on the internet. Steganography and Cryptography are two important areas of study when it comes to security of the message communicated on the internet. Steganography deals with hiding of the existence of the message while Cryptography deals with changing the message to unreadable form. This research work uses Data Encryption Standard (DES) for the cryptography to encrypt the message after which a Least Significant Bit (LSB) embedding technique to hide the encrypted message inside a RGB image. The advantage of this approach is that it helps to increase the capacity of data that can be hidden in the cover and also increases robustness against eavesdropper.