DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A SECURE IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY SYSTEM USING LSB AND CRYPTOGRAPHY

Computer Science

The rapid advancement of digital communication technologies has significantly increased the demand for secure transmission of confidential information over public networks. Traditional cryptographic techniques provide confidentiality by encrypting the message, but they cannot conceal the existence of the communication itself. Image steganography addresses this limitation by embedding secret information within digital images, thereby making the communication imperceptible to unauthorized users. This paper presents the design and implementation of a secure image steganography system that combines the Least Significant Bit (LSB) embedding technique with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptographic algorithm to achieve enhanced security. In the proposed approach, the secret message is first encrypted using AES-256 encryption and subsequently embedded into the least significant bits of the cover image. This dual-layer security mechanism protects both the content and the existence of the transmitted information. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), embedding capacity, and execution time. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid approach achieves high image quality with PSNR values exceeding 50 dB while maintaining low distortion and strong resistance against unauthorized extraction. The integration of cryptography with LSB steganography significantly improves confidentiality, robustness, and data integrity, making the proposed system suitable for secure multimedia communication, military applications, digital forensics, cloud storage, and healthcare information systems.

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