Information Hiding Secretly Using Image Steganography

Abstract

Steganography is the art of hiding the fact that communication is taking place, by hiding information in other information. Cryptography is a technique associated with the process of converting ordinary plain text into unintelligible text and vice-versa. In contrast to cryptography, steganography is not to keep others from knowing the hidden information, but it is to keep others from thinking that the information even exists. Together cryptography and Steganography can provide a powerful basis for data security. The main purpose of this project is to produce a security tool based on steganography and cryptography techniques for sending and receiving sensitive information over the internet. The program first encrypts the message data using AES algorithm and then embeds the result of encrypted data in the provided image file using steganography technique. The system also provides the feature for extracting the hidden data from the corresponding image file and decrypting the extracted data for eventually finding the original message. The embedding process follows image’s LSB replacement algorithm. To obtain the hidden message, the process is reversed. Using the system produced, messages were successfully encrypted and hidden inside an image file. Also, using the generated stego image, the hidden message was extracted and decrypted successfully.