Secure Communication Method Based on Encryption and Steganography

Encryption is a traditional method of scrambling data beyond recognition. For years, encryption has been widely used in various areas and domains where secrecy and confidentiality were required. However, there are certain encryption techniques that are not allowed in some countries. In these cases, steganography may come as a solution for hiding data using an apparently inoffensive and innocent carrier. The purpose of steganography is to deliver secret information from a sender to a receiver by scrambling the communication channel not the information itself. This way, it is very unlikely for someone to identify and extract the secret message without knowing exactly how it was embedded into the carrier. Moreover, this task is more difficult since most steganographic methods rely on file or packet header redundancy, lossy multimedia algorithms or insignificant content alteration. All of these are very hard to detect. In this paper, a combination of encryption with image based steganography is presented in order to offer similar robustness as offered by advanced encryption algorithms such as RSA, AES or DES but with lower resource needs. The most original contribution of this paper consists in how a secret message is embedded into a image carrier generating 3 different but very similar images. These images are sent to the destination using different channels and then used to recover the original (secret) message.