Enhancing Data Security in Networking Through AES Encryption and Steganography: A Comparative Analysis of DES and AES Algorithms

Information transfer has accelerated in the modern era. Numerous security difficulties were caused by the increasing transmission. The most popular methods to address this issue are cryptography and steganography. Steganography is the method of hiding secret data with a non- secret file to avoid data breaches whereas cryptography uses programs to encrypt and decrypt the data to make it secure. They both need to be combined so as to build a secure network that is not easily visible for hackers to breach as it looks like average data, despite the fact that these methods are frequently used together to reach higher degrees of security, a highly secure system is still required to transfer information through any communication channel while reducing the possibility of intrusion. In this paper, we suggest a data encryption system that makes use of effective AES and DES cryptography techniques. We present a way for secure data transfer by combining these encryption techniques with the technique of steganography. Our method effectively employs steganography techniques by inserting the encrypted text within an image's pixels. In addition to improving the security of data hiding compared to conventional techniques, this paper also enables us to assess the advantages and disadvantages of AES and DES in the context of data encryption and steganography.