IMAGE ENCRYPTION FOR SECURE NETWORK TRANSFER

Now-a-days, most of our data is travelled over internet so the security of that data is most important. Cryptography and Steganography are two important branches of information security. Cryptography provides encryption techniques for a secure communication. Many cryptographic algorithms are available and almost all are suitable for text encryption. Communicating only through text is not possible now-a–days and hence images, audios and videos are used for communication. Steganography involves hiding information in images. Apart from steganography, visual cryptography is widely used for securing transfer of images or visual secrets. One of the efficient methods for visual cryptography is Colour share generation in which the image is divided into shares and in decryption process all shares are stacked together to reveal the secret image. But implementing only Colour share generation will not be that much secured. Still there are some patterns in the Colour shares generated using many of the existing methods. This work proposes a new scheme for visual cryptography using both AES and Colour share generation. In this scheme R, G and B component is extracted from Colour image then apply Visual-AES algorithm on all components and generate an encrypted image. The encrypted image is then divided into Colour shares. At decryption side all shares are combined using Colour share combination and is passed as input to the Visual-AES decryption module to reveal the secret image.