A secure triple level encryption method using cryptography and steganography

Cryptography is the practice for secure communication in the presence of third parties. Steganography is technique of writing hidden messages such that except the sender and receiver, no one even suspects the existence of the message. In today's hi-tech age, threats from intruders are very great such that usage of either of the above techniques separately may not be able to provide the intended protection. In order to increase the level of protection, both the techniques may be used in a combined manner. Multimedia techniques can also be used to hide the data. In this paper, we propose an encrypting system which combines techniques of cryptography and steganography with data hiding. Instead of using a single level of data encryption, the message is encrypted twice. Traditional techniques have been used for this purpose. Then the cipher is hidden inside the image in encrypted format for further use. It uses a reference matrix for selection of passwords depending on the properties of the image. The image with the hidden data is used for further purposes.