A Combination of RSA Algorithm with Image Steganography to Ensure Enhanced Encryption

Data is a collection of raw facts and there are lots of ways to protect it securely. Cryptography and steganography play crucial roles in the protection of data in the modern world. In order to maintain security, this paper implements a combination of both cryptography and steganography techniques. In cryptography, this work implements four levels of encryption for odd lines of text. The techniques used for encrypting the odd lines of text are scrambling alpha-numeric sequence, Cryptographic message syntax padding technique, ASCII conversion, and finally the famous RSA algorithm. Even lines are encrypted with regular substitution techniques following which the entire encrypted text is injected into an image and this technique is known as image steganography. Image Steganography is one of the popular techniques used to hide messages, where the image is in the form of dimensions. These dimensions are converted into pixels and according to the pixels the encrypted text will be embedded in the image. The same process is applied inversely for decryption and also the performances measured by the parameters MSE and PSNR. Through these parameters, the normal image and stego image is compared and provide good results. The entire process proposed in this paper results in a high-security level and good performance.