A Novel Approach Towards Fusion of Steganography and Cryptography for Enhanced Data Security using RGB Image

Security has now become an essential part of communication on both sender and receiver's side. It is challenging to deliver comprehensive security against invaders since a lot of algorithms are expounded and can effortlessly get significant data by performing different hacking methods. High security-based algorithms like AES are nowadays used in various systems, as they present a high performance and is quite faster than most of stream-based encryption algorithms. Regardless of how reliable the technique is, the cipher-text always creates a doubt in brain when someone notices it, which makes the data prone to interception. Here arises another method of security to eliminate that suspicion, hence, we incorporate the confidential information into another format, such as an image, sound, video, or text and then transmit through the network. A novel security system based on three steps of hybrid architecture has been proposed in this paper by combining steganography and cryptography with codebooks. Two different keys are used to encrypt and then hide that highly secured encrypted message into the cover image. The message is encrypted first with AES algorithm and then placed at random positions in the cover image using codebook and KSA algorithm. AES encrypted message is mapped onto values of predefined codebooks then hide those encrypted message bits in LSBs of the cover image. The selected parameters are then passed on to the decryption side to recover the original message. Based on the achieved experimental results, it has outperformed the previous methodologies and without having the secret keys it is unfeasible to extract the message in a readable format.