Enhanced Security of Symmetric Encryption Using Combination of Steganography with Visual Cryptography

TL;DR

This paper presents a secure data transmission system combining cryptography and steganography, encrypting messages with Blowfish and visual cryptography, then embedding into images, enhancing security against various attacks.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated approach that combines cryptography and steganography, improving security and robustness over individual methods.

Findings

High security and robustness demonstrated through MSE and PSNR analysis.

Effective resistance to statistical and visual attacks.

Suitable for secure communication in public security sectors.

Abstract

Data security is required when communications over untrusted networks takes place. Security tools such as cryptography and steganography are applied to achieve such objectives, but both have limitations and susceptible to attacks if they were used individually. To overcome these limitations, we proposed a powerful and secured system based on the integration of cryptography and steganography. The secret message is encrypted with blowfish cipher and visual cryptography. Finally, the encrypted data is embedded into two innocent cover images for future transmission. An extended analysis was made to prove the efficiency of the proposed model by measuring Mean-Square-Error (MSE), Peak-Signal-to-noise-Ratio (PSNR), and image histogram. The robustness was examined by launching statistical and 8-bit plane visual attacks. The proposed model provides a secure mean to transmit or store highly classified data that could be applied to the public security sector.