Secure QR-Code Based Message Sharing System Using Cryptography and Steganography

Many cryptographic techniques are available for serving the purpose of information security over the web, servers and local systems. However, there is always demand of more security which may not be meet by such cryptographic algorithms alone because of known security attacks and mathematical complexity. Thus visualizing the strategic combination of cryptography and steganography techniques can provide a higher level of security. Quick Response (QR) codes are used extensively due to their beneficial characteristics. It includes robustness, readability, error correction capability, large data capacity than traditional barcodes etc. Thus, in this work, we propose a 3-layered architecture for securing message sharing mechanism by using QR code image in one layer. This architecture utilizes the empirical and strategic use of cryptography and steganography techniques. The proposed system provides the higher level of security on the basis of quantitative and qualitative results. Also, we evaluate our system against the performance evaluation criteria discussed in the paper.