Advanced Network Security using Cryptography and Steganography

Cryptography and steganography are well known and widely used techniques that manipulate information in order to cipher or hide their existence. These techniques have many applications in computer science and other related fields. They are used to protect e-mail messages, credit card information, corporate data, etc. In this paper we describe a method for integrating together cryptography and steganography through image processing. In particular, we present a system that able to perform steganography and cryptography at the same time using images as cover objects for steganography and as keys for cryptography. It is shown that such system is an effective steganographic one by making a comparison with the well known F5 algorithm and is also a theoretically unbreakable cryptographic one by demonstrating its equivalence to the Vernam Cipher.