A Novel Image Encryption Scheme with Huffman Encoding and Steganography Technique

In today’s day and age when everything is done with the aid of computing technology, the need for confidential communication has drastically increased. Not only the sensitive data such as top intelligent secrets of our nation but personal information of common people needs to be secure. Several combinations of cryptography and steganography techniques in different ways are used by researchers over the past to protect the data being transmitted. Cryptography uses mathematical algorithms to convert the data into an incomprehensible form and Steganography, on the other hand hides the data in a carrier such as image, data, audio or video. Cryptography provides necessary mechanisms for providing accountability, accuracy and confidentiality in public communication mediums such as the Internet and steganography is used in other fields such as copyright, preventing e-document forging etc. We are of the opinion that this security mechanism can further be increased by incorporating the use of Huffman coding in order to reduce the data length. This paper is an effort in the direction to hide, secure and compress the data. It explains the executed procedure by applying various encryption techniques one by one and our aim is to get the best security out of the existing ones. The proposed technique is implemented in MATLAB2016a and the results shown in this paper that our technique is better approach then the conventional techniques.