New Approaches to Ancient Crypto-Steganography Methods

Problem statement: The requirement and ability to hide information from others has existed in the world for centuries. Cryptography and steganography are the most commonly used techniques for information sharing. The science of securing a data by encryption is cryptography whereas the method of hiding secret messages in other media is Steganography, so that the secret’s very existence is concealed. Neither of them alone is secure enough for sharing information over an unsecure communication channel but at the same time they are vulnerable to intruder attacks. Although these techniques are often combined together to achieve higher levels of security but still there is a need of a highly secure system to transfer information over any communication media minimizing the threat of intrusion. Approach: Based on the combination of cryptography and steganography techniques, this study introduces two new methods to encrypt data and to hide the same in another media, in this way the message sent through an unsecured channel is concealed. Results: One of the methods shows how to encrypt and hide data in a xy graph and the other method shows a new way of encrypting and hiding data through Unicode symbols. Conclusion: Most of the traditional methods available today use the pixel bits of an image to hide information and are limited in terms of hiding capacity. The proposed methods hide information using Unicode symbols and plane xy coordinates which increases the hiding capacity and the message can be transmitted through an unsecured channel without any suspicion. This encoding and decoding scheme of the proposed method is significantly different as compared to the traditional methods.