Steganography Vs Cryptography

In the information age, sharing and transfer of data has increased tremendously and usually the information exchange is done using open channels which can make it vulnerable to interception. The threat of an intruder accessing secret information has been a continuing concern for data communication experts [6]. Steganography (SG) is one of many techniques used to overcome this threat. [16] It is an art of hiding the existence of communication, in contrast to cryptography. Basically it’s a method of concealing the information in ways that prevents the detection of hidden information. We should encrypt our information before communicating. By doing this, even if the message is being found, the intruder won’t be able to learn what we are trying

The advantage of steganography over cryptography alone is that messages do not attract attention to themselves. Plainly visible encrypted messages — no matter how unbreakable — will arouse suspicion, and may in themselves be incriminating in countries where encryption is illegal. Therefore, whereas cryptography protects the contents of a message, steganography can be said to protect both messages and communicating parties. But, the growing possibilities of modern communications need the special means of security especially on computer network. Consequently, the security of information has become a fundamental issue. Network security is becoming more important as the number of data being exchanged on the internet increases. Therefore, the confidentiality and the data integrity both require to be protected against unauthorized access and use. The result is the explosive growth in the field of information hiding. Stegnography hides the secret information within the host data set and reliably communicate it to a

SG is a very old practice for secret communication and can be traced back to techniques like invisible ink and microdots used by spies [7]. In general, the embedding operation in SG requires a digital medium to carry the data. Images and multimedia components, such as video and audio files, are widely used and exchanged through the internet. Such mediums are the best cover media to hide messages. Digital images are the most widespread cover files used for SG, due to their high embedding efficiency and the insensitivity of the human visual system (HVS) [8]. It is not necessary that the cover and message have a homogeneous structure. For example, it is possible to embed a recording of an audio stream message inside a digital image [9]. The simplest steganographic techniques embed the bits of the message directly into the least significant bit (LSB) plane of the cover image in a deterministic sequence [10, 11]. Different steganographic techniques focus on a variety of requirements such as robustness, tamper resistance, imperceptibility, security and capacity [12- 14]. Our technique is focused on providing high security and high speed operation while maintaining imperceptibility. We are using here Galois Operation (Encoder and Decoder) to provide high operational speed while maintaining the security intensively. The 2BC (two bit code) technique is the basic