The data can be protected or secured by using cryptography, water marking and data hiding techniques like steganography. In cryptography, encryption allows converting the readable text into unreadable cipher text whereas data hiding techniques embeds the additional data in the form of a media that could be a text, image, audio or video. Variety of data security techniques exists such as patch work, low bit rate data hiding, lossy compression etc. In this work, reversible data hiding, which uses XOR cryptosystem and lossless data hiding are the cryptography techniques implemented such that original media i.e., an image can be retrieved without any loss of data. The primary goal of this paper is to improve the security and privacy by employing a hybrid firefly algorithm for secret key generation for the XOR encryption which improves the performance of the proposed system. In order to prove the efficiency of the proposed method the parameters such as encryption time, mean square error, PSNR are calculated and compared with the existing methods. The results show better performance in terms of quality and data privacy by comparing it with the existing techniques.
Volume 11 | 08-Special Issue
Pages: 163-171