Data Security Using Multiple Image Steganography and Hybrid Data Encryption Techniques

There are advances in data stealth and forgery with the rise of technology and advances in data transmission. This arises the need for better and developed methods for data transmission. Data Transmission is an essential task in the current era, and equally important is the secure and safe information of that data. In the paper, batch steganography is used to secure data transmission from one end to the other. Often a password can be used for encoding the payload into the cover image. Here the data is encrypted using hashing and encryption techniques, SHA-256 and AES. The passwords used for encryption have been used after the logical operation XOR. Thus, the information has been encrypted twice using the XORed password for first and second input password for the next time. It increases the security of the data and makes the decryption almost impossible without knowing both the passwords and the encryption method. The encoded data is then embedded within the pixels of the original image using the LSB method. This prevents data theft and any possibilities of Man-in-the-Middle attacks since the time required for decrypting the data is drastically high without the knowledge of the inputs and the techniques used.