A combination of plain text and cipher text based steganography through advanced encryption standard

Abstract

Steganography is the way of hiding a secret data inside a trivial data and the extraction of it at its other end. The main aim of steganography is to conceal the presence of a message from unauthorized users. Many techniques are used to hide data in various formats in steganography. One of the methods is to use the Least Significant Bit. This paper is based on the concept of steganography and presents an idea to conceal the information into a color image (eg.JPEG, BMP) using last two significant bits of each pixel. Data is first encrypted by Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and then inserted into each pixel. Secrecy of the information is increased by encrypting the information and then embedding it into the image using steganography.