A Novel Scrambled Data Hiding Approach Towards Securing Sensitive Data

Our world is making its way toward complete digitization, with more and more data going to the Internet. Thus, the security of the data has become one of our utmost responsibilities. Strong and secure cryptography and steganography techniques have become the need of the hour to defend against modern adversaries. In this article, a novel scrambled data hiding approach is proposed to secure the sensitive information used in communications. The lacuna in the existing data hiding approaches is the loss of originality in the sensitive data to be attached, leading to poor information quality. This issue is addressed in the proposed approach by encrypting the data using the triple data encryption standard (DES) algorithm. The scrambled data are hidden in the audio file using the least significant bit (LSB) embedding. Experiments were conducted, and the proposed approach secured the sensitive information significantly without the loss of information quality. Furthermore, the secured information is retrieved by only the authenticated users with high quality.