NOVEL TECHNIQUE FOR SECURING DATA COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS BY USING CRYPTOGRAPHY AND STEGANOGRAPHY

Information security is becoming more important and attracting much attention nowadays, as the amount of data being exchanged over the internet increased. There are various techniques to secure data communication, but the well-known and widely used techniques are cryptography and steganography. Cryptography changes data into another form that is unreadable by anyone except the intended receiver. Steganography hides the existence of secret data in a cover medium, so that no one can detect the hidden data except the authorized receiver. In this paper, we proposed a new technique for securing data communication systems by combining cryptography and steganography techniques. The cryptography algorithm that was used in this paper is Modified Jamal Encryption Algorithm (MJEA); it is a symmetric (64-bit) block encryption algorithm with (120-bit) key. For steganography, we designed an enhanced form of Least Significant Bit (LSB) algorithm with (128-bit) steg-key. The performance of the proposed technique has been evaluated by considering several experimental tests, such as impressibility test, embedding capacity test and security test. For this purpose, the proposed technique was applied on several 24-bit colored PNG cover images. All experimental results proved the strength of the proposed algorithm in securing the transition of data over unsecure channels to protect it against any attack. Furthermore, the simulation results show the superiority of our proposed algorithm when compared with other algorithms in terms of PSNR and embedding capacity.