Image Encryption for Secure Internet Transfer

Dheeraj Chaitanya, G.; Febin Koshy, P.; Dinesh Kumar, D.; Himanshu, G.; Amarendra, K.; Mandhala, V. N.

Information security has always been an important aspect of consideration in daily life communication and with the advent of COVID-19 and communication, including sensitive data like corporate files, personal data, etc., increasingly moving online, it has become more important than ever to provide secure communication methods. One such method is using encryption and steganography. Encryption is the process of converting ordinary plaintext data into an alternative form that is unreadable by perpetrators without authorization. Furthermore, steganography is the practice of hiding a file, message, video, or image within another such file. In this paper, we introduce a web application that will enable the user to encrypt the data in a file of his choice and then hide it within a picture or GIF. This will provide the layman an application that is easy to use to communicate securely, even without extensive technical knowledge. The encryption algorithm used will be the AES-256 algorithm and the steganographic algorithm will be Syndrome-Trellis Codes (STCs) for their high embedding efficiency. The results display that the system designed offers a significant security level. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.