Steganography Based Data Hiding for Security Applications

Steganography is an art of sending hidden data or secret messages over a public channel so that a third party cannot detect the presence of the secret message. It is used widely in banking, military applications, E-commerce and so on because in it transmissions of information are more secure. In the current paper, the data are hidden in two stages. First, the data are hidden within an image and the image is further hidden in an audio file. For data hiding in image and image hiding in audio, Least Significant Bit (LSB) algorithm is used. In order to overcome security threats and to equip the data with high security, binary values of the data are hidden in different locations on the last three bits. The audio file selected may be a .WAV or .AIFF files. If the binary value of image is hidden in the last bit, the execution time is more. To reduce it, the binary value of the image is hidden in the last two bits of an audio file, so that the processing speed gets increased while execution time gets reduced. For security applications, the execution time should be less. Thus, the paper meets the security requirement and it can be used for military applications.