Secured data transmission using knight and LSB technique

Information security is to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information assets that use, store or transmit information from risk. It is achieved via the application of policy, education, training and awareness, and technology. Steganography is a fascinating and effective method of covert communication that involves hiding a message in an appropriate carrier such as an image or an audio file. The carrier can then be sent to a receiver without anyone else knowing that it contains a hidden message. This article proposes the hybrid approach towards implementation of Image Steganography using S-Box, Knight-Tour and 2-Bit LSB technique which exploits the weakness of the human visual system (HVS). For high security while embedding, three planes of RGB cover image are randomly chosen using row vector, divide the image into four pixel blocks and followed by knight's tour to select next block for embedding. The Knight's travel path is a pattern in which the path of a horse around a chess board is taken without revisiting any node. This travel path pattern is used to permute the pixel positions of the original image to obtain the scrambled image. This method makes sure that the communication has been encrypted before hiding it into a cover image. If in some case the secret message got uncovered from the cover image, the third person other than recipient can't access the data as it is in encrypted type. The PSNR value of the proposed technique is better than previous data hiding methods. This scheme has been implemented for images of various sizes and a comparative study in terms of PSNR and MSE is presented.