Two tier shield system for hiding sensitive textual data

Abstract

Delivery of unapparent information through visual streams has always been a challenging task in this Information Era. Encryption has been assisting to hide the information over the decades, however, the drastic development in technology, has indeed jeopardized the security obtained in that approach by utilizing the backdoors of such encryption algorithms. In that juncture, to hide the existence of data itself, Steganography techniques were later introduced. This paper has combined the use of both mechanisms to ensure the secrecy, security, privacy and confidentiality of sensitive data, which first encrypts the sensitive data and later conceal it in a carrier media. The encryption is done through AES256 algorithm and Digital Images are used as carrier multimedia. At first, sensitive data are encrypted using AES256 algorithm. By employing the popular and secure Least Significant Bit (LSB) approach in Steganography, the encrypted messages are randomly embedded within a digital image to be perceived as general White Noises. The use of both mechanisms have made the process of unintended access even complicated because, though the image was suspected to contain any secret messages there is still complexity to track the cipher. Thus, this two-tier security system could be a low-cost, feasible solution to hide the secret messages in Personal Computers.