A Systematic Approach for Data Hiding Using Cryptography and Steganography

Information Security has always been a very substantial facet when it comes to hindering unauthorised access, destruction or inspection of confidential data. Today every field in the world makes use of multimedia information like image, video, or audio and the file transmitted. To serve data security cryptography and steganography are mainly used techniques, each of them had a problem. Cryptography is that the art of saving information by encrypting it into an obscure format. On the opposite hand, steganography is that the art and science of secret communication to send messages during a way which hides even the existence of the communication. This paper provides a mixed system design utilizing cryptography and steganography techniques to provide a reliable communication system capable of resisting attackers. The affine cipher is used in this paper to encrypt the hidden text message which provides an effective level of security. After that, combining the techniques of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Least Significant Bit (LSB) cryptography is utilized to mask encrypted messages inside the image. The achievement of the built structure is measured using the value of Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) value, and analysis of histograms. The results indicate the system designed offers a noble security level.