Data masking using cryptographic techniques in steganography

Abstract

In today's world with the rapid development in technology we’ve entered the time where tremendous amounts of data are at constant risk and the security of data must be given utmost importance, we have cryptographic as well as steganographic techniques to achieve the same. In this paper, we have developed a method involving both these techniques to gain better results. Initially, the secret message to be transmitted is converted to ASCII values and is encrypted with the RSA asymmetric key cryptosystem and the obtained encrypted message which is in decimal format is converted to octal format and then to binary format by considering it as octal. Next, the binary bits attained are hidden inside any digital image by Least Significant Bits substitution to obtain the new image with secret message called as stego image is sent to the receiver, who performs inverse operations to obtain the secret message. Mean Squared Error and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio values between the original and stego images are computed and the results obtained by this method are found to be quite better than many other schemes.