Robust and Secured Image Steganography using Improved LSB and RC4 Cryptography with Preprocessing Operation

The security of the transmitted data over the internet has become one of the challenges sharing with data communication over computer network. In this paper, a new stegnography system is developed using Improved Least Significant Bit (ILSB) with preprocessing operation for concealing data. The system mixes several technological rules to enhance the performance of concealing scheme. The original secret image is divided into several segments then rearranged to even and odd. Rivest Cipher 4 (RC4) algorithm is applied on preprocessed image before concealing it on the cover image using ILSB. The proposed systems are simulated using MATLAB software package. The experimental results show that our suggested method successes of concealing data according to PSNR ratio, correlation and elapsed time. Preprocessing operation provides flexibility and robustness to the overall system. Improved LSB is simple and strong method for concealing images. Finally, the proposed system is very active to hide the gray scale image inside the color image