Two stage steganography on compressed and encrypted message

Abstract

Security of confidential information in the insecure era of information transmission (Internet) is still one of the most important challenges of the day. The combination of cryptography and steganography increases the security of embedded data to avoid from unauthorized access. Furthermore, compression of secret data reduces the size of transmitted message. In addition to compression and encryption, in this paper, two stage steganography is employed to enhance the security. In the proposed approach, the Huffman coding as lossless compression, the Blowfish, DES, 3DES, AES, and RSA as cryptography algorithms and LSB (Least significant Bit) as steganography technique are employed with enhancement of security by two stage steganography. The results are analyzed through quality parameters including MSE (Mean Square Error) and PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), and histogram of images.