Author : Sowmyashree and R.R.Sedamkar

The present scenarios of sending confidential information over the network are not considered to be very secure. During transmission they are vulnerable to many kinds of security integrity attacks. In this paper, a unique approach for secure data communication is proposed which is a combination of Reversible Data Hiding and Image Encryption techniques. In this approach confidential data is embedded in the image and image is encrypted before transmission. At the receiver end, image is decrypted and hidden data is extracted and original image is recovered. By doing this more security could be provided to the transmission of confidential data. By using more enhanced Algorithms for Reversible Data Hiding and Encryption it will be difficult for an intruder to access the secret data. Most of the work emphases on data hiding in encrypted images whereas, here focus is on data hiding in images and then providing security by means of image encryption. Reversible data hiding helps in preserving the quality of the image after data extraction. A block pixel frequency based histogram shifting algorithm is used for data embedding. This algorithm embeds good payload of data preserving high quality of the image. Hash Image Encryption Algorithm is used to encrypt the stego-image which gives lower correlation and higher entropy indicating high level of security. Many state of art data security and data hiding algorithms have been developed for secure data communication but lacking in security and integrity with modern challenges which we have overcome here with combine approach of data hiding and image encryption. The proposed method improves security and integrity of sensitive data.

Keywords: Reversible data hiding, Image encryption, stego-image, image Entropy, Correlation, Histogram Analysis

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.4, No.6 (Dec-2014)