Bifold-crypto-chaotic steganography for visual data security

As digital images hold sensitive information from a number of areas, such as human, medical, satellite and biometric, etc., they therefore require the utmost protection. These photos hold various vulnerability threats and in this era of cloud and virtualization, to protect data from hackers, we need an efficient way to safeguard data that would provide a hybrid type of algorithm to protect data from multiple types of hackers. The approach is innovative and safe in the sense that it has two-fold protections for the safety of a secret message or information. Secret message is encrypted twice with Arnold and Logistic maps prior to transmission. The approach effectively blends the two aspects of visual data security with the integration of a chaotic mechanism in such a manner that optimal security can be obtained. The aim is to conceal a message or plain text and at the same time protect it by encrypting hidden keys and by means of DWT and a chaotic phenomenon. Therefore, by integrating these two approaches, the new approach conceptualizes dual encryption. Numerous metric studies, such as PSNR, MSE, correlation coefficient and SSIM, have been carried out for validation purposes. The results demonstrate that the system performs well with various grayscale images and outperforms cryptography and steganography alone in terms of security and reliability. © 2022, Bharati Vidyapeeth's Institute of Computer Applications and Management.