A 3DES Double–Layer Based Message Security Scheme

Nowadays, there are hundreds of applications that need to secure their transmission, where a lot of techniques were implemented and applied for this reason. Attackers are always breaking these secure techniques to penetrate the communication channel. Steganography and cryptography are two approaches that provide the channel with data security. Steganography hides the data by inserting it into digital media e.g. images, videos, and audios. Cryptography encrypts the data in a way that makes it unreadable for anyone other than the receiver. In this work, a well–secured algorithm is implemented through integrating the two layers, the cryptography layer and the steganography layer. In cryptography we applied the 3–DES technique. In steganography we embedded the secret message in an image using an enhanced least signicant bit (LSB) technique. We used the Peak Signal–to–Noise Ratio (PSNR), the mean squared error (MSE) and structure similarity index measure (SSIM) to evaluate the quality of the image after the embedding. In order to investigate the performance we simulated our proposed algorithm on different images and the results showed that the PSNR reaches up to 75 dB and MSE of 0.0018. Moreover, the obtained results were compared with some of the popular LSB steganographic methods. The comparison made shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms the common LSB steganographic methods in terms of the PSNR and the MSE, while maintaining an excellent SSIM.