A Lookup XOR Cryptography for High Capacity Least Significant Bit Steganography

Security of information and optimal bandwidth utility has become major problem with growth in data communication over computer networks. Steganography and cryptography are two different data hiding techniques employed to solve this problem. Steganography hides messages inside some other digital media. Cryptography, on the other hand obscures the content of the message. This work proposes a high capacity data security approach by the combination of Steganography and cryptography techniques. In the process a message is first encrypted using a newly developed symmetric key Lookup XOR cryptographic algorithm and thereafter the encrypted message is embedded inside an image file using lease significant bit (LSB) insertion method used in [2] and [5]. This combinational methodology satisfies requirements such as capacity, security and robustness for secure data transmission over the network better than Data Encryption Standard (DES) because it provides a strong encryption scheme with minimized cipher text using a one-to-one mapping through the aid of a look-up table. General Terms Security, encryption, decryption, High Capacity, Algorithms