Highly Secure Method for Secret Data Transmission

In this research, we present a new method for protecting confidential and private data, which combines the two processes of data cryptography and data steganography. The data protection process in the proposed method depends on the use of a colored digital image used to generate the private key to carry out the encryption and decryption process, where this image is agreed upon by the sender and receiver and is not transmitted and is kept secret. The image_key is used to generate the secret key for any text message, regardless of its length. The proposed method uses some improved procedures to hide data in the digital carrier image. The use of these procedures will raise the efficiency of the method compared to the least significant method, which is frequently used in the process of data hiding. It will be shown how the proposed method will decrease the hiding and extraction times and how it will be improved the value of the quality parameters MSE and PSNR.