An Encryption Approach with Steganography for Enhanced Data Security
Munmun Islam Mitu, Suraiya Sweety, Sajjad Waheed · 2024
The present study focuses on the protection of confidential information. Steganography and cryptography are techniques used to hide secret information within files and make it unreadable to unauthorised individuals. The current approach employs a hashing method to protect the less secure element, namely the Advanced Encryption Standard key. The suggested approach enhances the level of information secrecy and covert information exchange by encrypting the data and embedding it within a multimedia file, specifically an image. A cipher text is generated through the encryption of a text using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a highly secure encryption technique that has been in use for a considerable duration. This encryption process employs a 256-bit hash key generated by the Secure Hash Algorithm 256. By employing the Discrete Wavelet Transform, the encrypted text is seamlessly embedded into the target image, modifying it in a manner that remains imperceptible to human vision. It ensures that the aesthetic integrity of an image is maintained. Human eyes occasionally perceive the distortion or modification in the picture. The system’s performance is assessed using statistical measures, namely peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), and structural similarity (SSIM).The PSNR values indicate superior image quality, while the low Mean Squared Error (MSE) values suggest that the model performs well with low variance and an appropriate fit. Additionally, the SSIM values signify excellent quality, minimal degradation, and effective compression or enhancement. The proposed model has shown its capability to send a cover picture with high invisibility, minimal deterioration in the received stego-image, and the capacity to hide confidential information.