Enhanced blend of image steganography and cryptography

As there is large advancements in internet technology, there has been huge text as well as multimedia data transfer over the internet. Due to this data security is a vital necessity. Steganography and Cryptography are the sets of techniques to provide security to data. Steganography is an art of hiding secret information into another cover medium like image, audio, video, etc. Cryptography is an art of converting plain data into unreadable format. Steganography can be integrated with Cryptography in order to enhance the security of data. In this paper, a new method is proposed to provide security to 24 bit color images, by integrating Steganography and Cryptography. In this method, randomized LSB based method is used to hide an image in another image. The resulting stego image is then encrypted using chaotic theory. This new integrated method ensures the enhancement in the data hiding capacity, the security of the image and lossless recovery of the secret data.