With the growing internet technology over the last decade, the number of intruders trying to steal the confidential information has also risen. As a result, for the protection of secret data from unwanted access, hybrid security mechanisms employing the use of steganography to hide the encrypted data are gaining popularity. These mechanisms provide an extra level of security to the data. This paper proposes a hybrid mechanism that not only aims at providing good security but at the same time has high data embedding capacity and entropy values with low execution time complexity. To enhance the embedding capacity of the overall system, Improved Bit Plane Complex Steganography (IBPCS) along-with Huffman coding is used and for providing randomness, the use of chaos process wherever possible is done. The cryptographic technique employed is hierarchical visual cryptography due to its efficiency over other cryptographic mechanisms. The overall scheme is implemented in MATLAB-10 and the results prove that the proposed mechanism is efficient to other available schemes in literature.
['Neha Tayal', 'Ritesh Bansal', 'Sangeeta Dhal', 'Shailender Gupta']
A novel hybrid security mechanism for data communication networks