The information security becoming more important and attracting much attention nowadays as the number of data being exchanged over the internet increased. There are various techniques to secure data communication, but the well-known and widely used techniques are cryptography and steganography. Cryptography changes the form of data in another form that is unreadable by anyone except the intended receiver. Steganography hide the existence of the secret data in other cover media so no one can detect the hidden data except the authorized receiver. In this paper, we proposed a new technique for securing the data communication systems by combining cryptography and steganography techniques. The cryptography algorithm that was used in this paper is Modified Jamal Encryption Algorithm (MJEA); it is a symmetric (64-bit) block encryption algorithm with (120-bit) key. For steganography we designed an enhanced form of Least Significant Bit (LSB) algorithm with (128-bit) Steg-Key. The performance of the proposed technique has been evaluated by considering several experimental tests such as impressibility test, embedding capacity test and security test. For this purpose, the proposed technique was applied on several 24-bit colored PNG cover images. Different simulation metrics adopted in the evaluation process such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), the payload embedding capacity and the histogram distribution analysis. Furthermore, an image quality comparison between the proposed technique and other LSB algorithms similar to our work has been conducted. All experimental results proved the strength of the proposed algorithm in securing the transition of data over unsecure channel to protect it against any attack. Furthermore, the simulation results show the superiority of our proposed algorithm when compared with other algorithms in terms of PSNR and embedding capacity.
Key words: Cryptography, Steganography, hybrid system, Information Hiding, Information Security, MJEA, LSB
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