Encryption then steganography framework on high capacity data hiding in grayscale images

Abstract

In the modern digital world, Communication technology has major role for sending and receiving information across networks. Various formats of information are transmitted over the communication channels including text, image and video. The advancement in technology provides an easy and fast way of transmitting the data. However, the channel used for communication is not fully protected from different attacks, due to that it cannot be fully trusted. To secure the data transmitted over the communication channel, is protected using different mechanisms like, cryptography and steganography. Cryptography is an art of secret writing. The strength of cryptography mainly depends on the key used for encoding the data. Depends on the way in which how data is encoded using the key, there are symmetric and asymmetric algorithms. Steganography is cover writing. The information is covered in the carrier image and then transmitted over the channel. The data is restored in the receiving side by separating the carrier image and data separately. The research is carried out with two main objectives. First objective is to ensure the security of the data, which is achieved in by applying Encryption Then Steganography (ETS). Second objective was to increase the capacity of hiding the data. Experimental results have proved that the proposed framework has performed excellently on the objectives.