Visual cryptographic steganography in images

In today's information age, information sharing and transfer has increased exponentially. The threat of an intruder accessing secret information has been an ever existing concern for the data communication experts. Cryptography and steganography are the most widely used techniques to overcome this threat. Cryptography involves converting a message text into an unreadable cipher. On the other hand, steganography embeds message into a cover media and hides its existence. Both these techniques provide some security of data neither of them alone is secure enough for sharing information over an unsecure communication channel and are vulnerable to intruder attacks. Although these techniques are often combined together to achieve higher levels of security but still there is a need of a highly secure system to transfer information over any communication media minimizing the threat of intrusion. In this paper we propose an advanced system of encrypting data that combines the features of cryptography, steganography along with multimedia data hiding. This system will be more secure than any other these techniques alone and also as compared to steganography and cryptography combined systems Visual steganography is one of the most secure forms of steganography available today. It is most commonly implemented in image files. However embedding data into image changes its color frequencies in a predictable way. To overcome this predictability, we propose the concept of multiple cryptography where the data will be encrypted into a cipher and the cipher will be hidden into a multimedia image file in encrypted format. We shall use traditional cryptographic techniques to achieve data encryption and visual steganography algorithms will be used to hide the encrypted data.