Double-Layer Image Security Scheme with Aggregated Mathematical Sequences

Abstract

Information security has been a major concern since the evolution of technology. Nowadays, internet users' are increasing and their information is being shared almost every second. Two possible information security techniques are cryptography and steganography. This paper proposes a hybrid use of both of these techniques. As a first security layer, one of the following cryptography techniques is used: AES-128, AES-192, AES-256, Blowfish or a Logistic Map, to encrypt the secret message. The second layer is steganographic, employing a number of complex mathematical sequences that determine the color in which the enciphered bits would be embedded in. Visual representation of the stego and the cover images after embedding is presented and the performance of the proposed scheme is measured in terms of the mean squared error (MSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index metric (SSIM), image fidelity, embedding capacity, $R$ measurement, and entropy values of the cover and stego images.