A Hybrid Method for Covert Communication Using Steganography and Image Fusion

Day to day, network and its technologies is getting rapid growth, due to its improved infrastructure in to hold on; the situation organization and migration of recent updates will leads the network called Security flaw. Various security options are available since the data leakage and back door communication leads to heavy data loss to the organization. In this paper we developed a new scheme which is hybrid in nature, combines two distinct domains. 1) Steganography (Combination of Image + cryptography) and 2) Image Fusion – Fusing two images. Steganography embeds the digital data message along with the media file where digital data may be text, image or hybrid. Although both Cryptography and steganography are combined to provide security in some criteria yet advanced system of security is needed to share information without any interference. To overcome the real world problem we proposed a novel algorithm called StegFuse where cryptography and steganography is applied on two various images, after applying steganographic technique both the images are subjected to image fusion in order to get the fused image. Wavelet transform is applied on both the image during fusion. Traditional cryptographic techniques are used for encryption of digital data and steganographic algorithms are used to hide the encrypted data in the images. KEYWORDS–Steganography; Image Fusion; Encryption; Decryption; Public Key; Private Key