A novel combination of information confidentiality and data hiding mechanism

Abstract

Due to the widespread accessibility of the Internet, communicating and sharing multimedia content between people is extremely easy today. At the same time, however, a critical issue is the secure transfer of personal and protected material. In this article, we have proposed a new information security mechanism. The proposed system comprises two phases. In the first phase, the digital data is encrypted and in the second phase, the encrypted data is embedded into the cover data. The encryption scheme consists of both diffusion and confusion. For diffusion, we have utilized a logistic chaotic map-based novel diffusion. For confusion pre-defined highly nonlinear S-boxes are used. This mechanism provides dual layers of security to the confidential information, which makes it difficult for the intruder to extract the confidential information. The security analysis of the encryption and data hiding schemes are carried out and tabulated. For implementation on hardware the time analysis is carried out, and the time for encryption and data hiding comes out to be 1.662 seconds, which is reasonable for real-time implementation. The security analysis of encryption and data hiding shows the immunity of the proposed system to withstand different attacks.