An Enhanced Digital Text passing system using SHA-512 and AES

Abstract

In the present scenario the use of images increased extremely in the cyber world so that we can easily transfer data with the help of these images in a secured way. Image steganography becomes important in this manner. Steganography and cryptography are the two techniques that are often confused with each other. The input and output of steganography looks alike, but for cryptography the output will be in an encrypted form which always draws attraction to the attacker. This paper combines both steganography and cryptography so that attacker doesn’t know about the existence of message and the message itself is encrypted to ensure more security. The textual data entered by the user is encrypted using AES algorithm. After encryption, the encrypted data is stored in the colour image by using a hash based algorithm. We have proposed a novel algorithm for mixing the AES ciphertext and the SHA-512 hash obtained from plaintext, which is embedded into an image so that the attacker cannot separate them for applying cryptanalysis.

Keywords - Steganography, Cryptography, Hashing, AES algorithm