Implementation of Hybrid Cryptography in Steganography for Augmented Security

Now-a-days, many billions and trillions of data exchanged over the internet per second. Ensuring the security of data is a major priority in the realm of information technology.To provide data security, many technologies have been evolved like cryptography, steganography, visual cryptography, watermarking, etc,. This article combines both cryptography and steganography for providing security. Using modified hill cipher algorithms, it first turns the original message into a secret message. Traditionally, only the alphabets are encrypted with hill cipher. But, the proposed modified hill cipher algorithm can encrypt any type of message using Radix64 encoding/decoding conversion. And the keys which are used in hill cipher algorithm encrypted using modified RSA algorithm. The 2-bit LSB technique is then used to embed the encrypted keys and secret message into the cover image to create the stego-image. Then, the stego-image is transferred to the recipient side through secure channel. The recipient must follow the entire process backwards after receiving the stego-image in order to receive the original message. Finally, the parameters of several performance measures such as Entropy, MSE, PSNR, and histogram are measured. A substantial improvement in efficiency and security can be observed with the proposed system.