An improved method for reversible data hiding steganography combined with cryptography

Information Security has always been a very substantial facet when it comes to hindering unauthorised access, destruction or inspection of confidential data. Today every field in the world makes use of multimedia information. There is need to secure the confidential information used in these areas. There are multiple approaches to secure information. One of them is Steganography, which is the nothing but hiding the information inside other data such that there is no detectable change in cover information. The auxiliary technique of securing information is cryptography, an encryption technique which scrambles the information into a scribbled form which is generally referred to as cipher. Both Steganography and Cryptography have their own advantages and limitations. Even though both methods provide security, to add multiple layers of security it is always a good practice to use Cryptography and Steganography together. So when cryptography and steganography are used together, it results in multi-layer security model. The main objective of the proposed work is to provide extra layer of security by introducing cryptography along with steganography to encrypt and embed the confidential information to be sent over a non-secure channel.