Encryption and decryption using hybrid cryptography techniques and multi-level steganography

Abstract

Data Encryption, in the present time, is used to deter malicious parties from accessing sensitive data, allowing the access to only authorized parties as it uses the key to safeguard the sensitive information to be transferred. Various cryptography techniques are used to maintain confidentiality and integrity of the data, and this paper proposes the hybrid scheme of using four layers of encryption including steganography to safeguard the authenticity of the information to be transferred. In this paper, three conventional key cryptography algorithms, which are Fibonacci series, XOR cipher and PN sequence encryption, are used along with RSA cryptography which is a public key cryptography algorithm. In addition to it, steganography technique is also used in the last two layers of our proposed model. Firstly, the whole of the encrypted string, obtained after the above cryptography algorithms, is hidden inside the first image. Now this encrypted host image is further hidden inside another image by using one bit LSB algorithm. This model offers the double security of the data as here the data is not only encrypted but also hidden in an image which again is hidden inside another image making it very hard even to detect the data.