A Hybrid System Based on Three Levels to Hide Information using JPEG Color Images

Abstract

Nowadays, due to the circulation of information among people, information security has become an important requirement to protect information from hacking. Many techniques have been discovered to protect this information and maintain its confidentiality from hacking, the most prominent of which are cryptography and steganography techniques. In this paper, a hybrid system is based on three levels to hide information using  Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) color images, where this system works in both processes sender and receiver. The sender process at the first level uses a mixing of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA), while at the second level it uses a Fuzzy Stream Algorithm (FSA), which adds a higher complexity and eliminates the non-linearity of the encrypted information. The third level is to hide encrypted information using the least significant bit (LSB) technique, while the receiver process, performs the reverse process of three levels. This system provides high information embedding capability and the inability to perceive hidden information. The system was evaluated based on criteria like peak signal noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), structure similarity (SSIM), and correlation, which were characterized by high and good rates. The study was compared with modern stenography techniques.