208 - 230
Evolutionary Computing Assisted Visually-Imperceptible Hybrid Cryptography and Steganography Model for Secure Data Communication over Cloud Environment
Authors: Denis R, Madhubala P
Number of views: 184
The exponential growth of communication technologies and related application environments has broadened the cloud computing ecosystem horizon to meet major communication needs. However, in-parallel upsurge in online attacks, security breaches or allied intrusion events has alarmed industries to ensure optimal data security. Unlike text data transmission, image, or other multimedia communication over the cloud requires computational efficiency, imperceptibility, etc. to meet attack-resilient transmission. Amongst the major available security systems, the combination of cryptosystems and steganography has been identified as an augmented security model for data transmission. However, it demands enhancement in both stages to meet cloud-specific communication efficiency. Considering it as motivation, in this paper an efficient Visually Imperceptible Hybrid Crypto-Steganography (VIHCS) model is developed using Hybrid Cryptosystems followed by Adaptive Genetic Algorithm assisted Least Significant Bit (LSB) embedding process. We developed a novel Hybrid Cryptosystem by strategically applying Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithms to secure secret data to be embedded in a cover image. In addition, the use of the Adaptive Genetic Algorithm based Optimal Pixel Adjustment (AGA-OPAP) strengthened the Least Significant Bit embedding while retaining the best possible image quality and visual imperceptibility. The proposed model achieved higher security, high embedding capacity as well as image quality, which is vital for cloud communication. To perform LSB embedding we applied 2D-Discrete Wavelet Transform (2D-DWT-2L) method with 8×8 dimensional block-wise embedding. It helps to achieve better embedding efficiency in conjunction with the AGA-OPAP model. Simulation results and respective visio-statistical assessment revealed that the proposed VIHCS model can accomplish better performance and reliable secure data communication over the cloud environment. Thus, the VIHCS model achieves maximum possible imperceptibility and hence can avoid attacks- such as steganalysis based attack or RS-attacks.