Hybrid information security system via combination of compression, cryptography, and image steganography

Abstract

Today, the world is experiencing a new paradigm characterized by dynamism and rapid change due to revolutions that have gone through information and digital communication technologies, this raised many security and capacity concerns about information security transmitted via the Internet network. Cryptography and steganography are two of the most extensively that are used to ensure information security. Those techniques alone are not suitable for high security of information, so in this paper, we proposed a new system was proposed of hiding information within the image to optimize security and capacity. This system provides a sequence of steps by compressing the secret image using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) algorithm, then using the advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm for encryption compressed data. The least significant bit (LSB) technique has been applied to hide the encrypted data. The results show that the proposed system is able to optimize the stego-image quality (PSNR value of 47.8 dB) and structural similarity index (SSIM value of 0.92). In addition, the results of the experiment proved that the combination of techniques maintains stego-image quality by 68%, improves system performance by 44%, and increases the size of secret data compared to using each technique alone. This study may contribute to solving the problem of the security and capacity of information when sent over the internet.