Disguising Text Cryptography using Image Cryptography
Vidyasagar M. Potdar, Elizabeth Chang · 2004
Abstract The goal of cryptography is to provide confidentiality and privacy by scrambling information. If this information is deciphered then this goal is defeated. In this paper we present a technique that allows cryptography to inherit some features from steganography in such a way that the information is encrypted as well as hidden. The pro-posed solution is to use image cryptography to hide textual data. The process is to transfer encrypted textual data but in image format. This approach has a unique disguising feature; since images are often used in context of steganography, anyone who finds suspicious images would try to steganalyse it rather than cryptanalyse. The proposed technique is to disguise text cryptography with image cryptography and provide enhanced confidential-ity and privacy in personal communication. (125 words) Keywords Image Cryptography, Information Hiding, Steganography, Image, Symmetric Key 1. Introduction Cryptography is the art and science of scrambling information. It has an extensive and mesmerizing history, and there is evidence that the Egyptians used cryptography about 4000 years ago. However, information scrambling has become an impediment in the postmodern world, which is demonstrated by the fact that government agencies internationally are trying to control the use of cryptography. These agencies think cryptography is hindering their intel-ligence gathering activities. The phenomenon has resulted in widespread study of steg-anography. Steganography, which literally means covered writing, includes methods of transmitting secret message through innocuous cover mediums, which cloak the existence of the embedded messages, rendering them undetectable. The proposed solution is to use image cryptography for disguising encrypted or normal textual information. This is a hybrid tech-nique that inherits features from steganography and cryptography. This paper is organized as follows: In §2, we raise the issues associated with privacy and confidentiality. In §3 we summarize the research done in the field of image cryptography and steganography. In §4 we discuss our proposed solution. In §5 we evaluate our proposed con-ceptual framework, and in §6 we conclude with future directions.