Dual Steganography Approach Using 3D Playfair Cipher and Pixel Value Differencing Method

Abstract

In this paper we attempted to incorporate a text encoding technique 3D Playfair Cipher with Pixel Value Differencing (PVD) approach to achieve dual steganography. Dual steganography is very demanding in the present scenario, because steganography is only playing a role to stealth intruder, but sometimes existence of secret data got recognized, in such scenarios dual steganography can only protect our secret exchange. In steganography hiding capability is equally concerned as much as security, so compression of secret message is preferable before imparting it in cover medium. These requirements pushed us to implement a fast, secure, effective and handy steganographic approach to solve secure information exchange problems. In this research we took the advantage of 3D Playfair cipher not to only encode our secret message but also to reduce its size. Here dual steganography is formed using 3D Playfair cipher with PVD method. PVD method implements the concept that edge areas are more vulnerable that smooth areas in images to conceal secrets,which makes it a powerful approach in the field of image steganography due to its stegoimage quality and data hiding capabilities. PVD method hides data in cover image based on the difference of pixel value in the pixel pairs (nonoverlapping consecutive pixels). Proposed approach is much secure and better in data hiding capability along with ensuring better quality stego image quality, it also solves the problem of falling the boundary of the pixels presents in PVD method. Produced Stegoimage of proposed technique is secure enough against the RS detection attack and totally indistinguishable by human eyes.