A novel hybrid security mechanism for data communication networks

摘要

In the recent past various hybrid mechanisms that combine both steganography and cryptography have been proposed by researchers to ensure security in data communication networks since standalone method does not provide fruitful results. In cryptography, if the hacker is able to guess the secret key he can easily decrypt the data. On the other hand, if changes are somehow visible in image, the hacker may apply steganography technique to recover the plaintext. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel hybrid mechanism for efficient and secure data communication. The proposal uses both cryptography and steganography along with Huffman coding to provide good level of security to the secret data. The cryptographic technique used is cryptography and the steganography technique used is LSB using status bit. The proposed mechanism is implemented in MATLAB-09. To analyse the efficacy of the proposed mechanism, we use security, robustness and efficiency analysis. The result shows that our mechanism is much more secure as well as robust in comparison to the schemes in literature. In addition, the mechanism has lesser value of time complexity, high embedding capacity and better picture quality.