A New Approach for Data Security in Cryptography and Steganography

This work deals with the combination of cryptography and steganography to handle the problems of information security. A new encryption algorithm is proposed based on matrix scrambling which uses arithmetic operations, random functions, circular shifting and exchanging operations to get the encrypted message. Further, security is enhanced by steganography method where the encrypted message is hidden in the image based on the gini index value. For each R G B component of the pixel, gini index is calculated and the component with least value will have the encrypted message. The proposed method provides dual security since the encrypted message is hidden at different positions of 4 LSB of image. Avalanche effect is used as the metric for analyzing the performance of the encryption algorithm.