Enhanced security in steganography using encryption and Quick Response code

Transferring confidential data is a real challenge and is the need of the hour. Steganography deals with concealing secret message in the image whereas cryptography is about altering the message into a distorted form, so that it is prevented from unauthorized access. Combining both the steganographic and cryptographic techniques will yield a secure and sophisticated system for exchanging the secret information between the sender and receiver. Quick Response codes, also known as two-dimensional barcodes are used for increased encoding space. In this paper, a secure information model is presented by combining cryptography and steganography. QR codes are employed for encoding the encrypted message. A nested image steganography is performed with QR codes on a suitable cover image. The proposed approach has a potential to be employed in communicating confidential information.