Secure Image Transmission using Cipher Block Chaining Mode&Visual Steganography

With the fast progression of technology in todays information age, data security has become a major concern in terms of data storage and data transmission. Information in any form is not safe in the hands of unauthorized people. Privacy and security of data is of utmost concern nowadays and hence techniques like Cryptography and Steganography are used to overcome these threats. As Cryptography is the technique of encryption of secure data in order to enhance its security and On the other hand, Steganography embeds secret image into a cover media and hides its existence, both these techniques help provide security of data. Neither of them alone is secure enough for sharing information over an unsecure communication channel. In this paper we propose an advanced system of securing data that combines the features of cryptography, steganography along with multimedia data hiding. To enhance the security, we propose the combined concept of visual cryptographic steganography where the secret image will be divided into slices and these slices will be encrypted using Cipher Block Chaining forming a cipher image and then this cipher image will be divided into shares which in turn will be embedded into cover images thus forming stego images. The resultant stego image is then decrypted to recover the original.