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.
