Silent secrecy: A hybrid steganographic scheme to conceal information

Rapid growth of technology allows people to communicate electronically, but information privacy is not everyone that is aware of. Apparently, users may depend on solely encryption or data hiding, without realising our private message also can be exposed and tempered by the malicious user. This paper presents a hybrid approach of cryptographic approach before hiding the encrypted message into a cover image. The hybrid approach is binding the Extended Tiny Encryption (XTEA) algorithm with a session-based key generator. Our main focus is to retain the image quality after hiding a string of encrypted message. Subsequently, we also aim to prevent the secret message from being read or tempered by restricting the receiver reading the message within a time period that defined by the sender.