Multilevel Data Concealing Technique Using Steganography and Visual Cryptography

Abstract

Steganography is a data hiding technique which uses images, audio or video as a cover medium. Cryptography has become an essential part of security. Image Steganography is one such way to hide secret messages in an image to reduce vulnerability to cryptanalysis. We overcome the drawbacks of using only textual steganography as it is easier to intercept and decipher. We encrypt the plaintext with a randomly generated key using XOR and One Time Pad (OTP) Algorithm and in turn embedding it into the Least Significant Bit (LSB) of the cover image. We embed the cipher text in LSB of the pixels of the cover image to form Stego image. To enhance and ensure security, we use visual cryptography along with image scrambling. Image scrambling is a technique in which the location of pixels is scrambled to provide extra protection to the Stego image. Visual cryptography is a method used to encrypt the visual information by breaking it into shares. Using both image scrambling and visual cryptography makes the system not only more secure but also difficult to decrypt. A decryption algorithm for the same is also constructed in this paper.