Crystographic Digital Video Security Using Modified Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

The proliferation of digital multimedia content has necessitated the development of secure methods for legal distribution to mitigate issues like alterations, exploitation, and illegal duplication during video communication. Crystography, a combination of cryptography and steganography, enhances information hiding security by encrypting data while concealing its presence. However, existing video steganographic techniques are vulnerable to attacks and suffer from high computational overhead. This study proposes an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) modification combining Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), dubbed AES-FFT, to improve data hiding, encryption, and decryption time efficiency. Two video formats from YouTube were evaluated: an AVI video with 200 frames and an MP4 video with 402 frames. Many video applications require fast, real-time data hiding, necessitating techniques with low encryption/decryption time overhead.The results demonstrate AES-FFT's superior performance over traditional AES. For the AVI format, AES-FFT encrypted all frames in 0.5356 ms compared to 1.8552 ms for AES, and decrypted in 0.5204 ms versus 1.8408 ms for AES. Similarly, for the MP4 format, AES-FFT encrypted in 0.2363 ms versus 1.5360 ms (AES), and decrypted in 0.2200 ms compared to 1.5185 ms (AES). Lower encryption/decryption times indicate better performance, highlighting AES-FFT's significant speed advantage over AES for encrypting and decrypting video files securely.This technique's ability to enhance data hiding security while reducing computational overhead holds promise for efficient, secure digital video distribution across various applications.