DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN INFORMATION SECURITY SYSTEM USING IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT

In today’s data communication environments, information security is an important issue in data storage and transmission. Due to the security attacks on data communication, effective data hiding systems are needed to ensure information security. Cryptography was created as a technique for securing the secrecy of communication and many different methods have been developed to encrypt and decrypt data in order to keep the message secret. Unfortunately it is sometimes not enough to keep the contents of a message secret, it may also be necessary to keep the existence of the message secret. With the proposed system, vital information can be concealed via the method of image steganography. Steganography provides security by concealing existence of information being communicated. The study outlines the main concepts of the analysis and design methodology of the proposed system and implementation of the system. The tools used were; waterfall model, Java, C# (C Sharp) with NET Framework. Waterfall model is used to illustrate the software development process while Java aspect takes care of the user authentication, like creating users and logging into the program, C# takes care of the steganography and encryption and C# runs on Net framework. And then, the transformed image is encrypted by using Blowfish encryption algorithm. After getting the encrypted image, the secret message is hidden within this image which is used as a cover by using LSB embedding technique for information security. Moreover, to prove the advantages of combination process (optimized transformation and Blowfish encryption).Furthermore, some thought about where image steganography might go in the future are briefly discussed.