Amalgamation of Scanning paths and Modified Hill Cipher for Secure Steganography

In the era of modern technology, secured exchange of information is of high priority. Security is needed to exchange range of data from military intelligence to personal information. Therefore, it is important to develop methods to exchange this information through insecure channels without being compromised. In this paper a new method is proposed to hide information in a gray scale image. The secret data is encrypted using a modified version of Hill cipher algorithm. The encrypted data is then embedded in the cover image. The method used is LSB substitution. In this paper, various methods of scanning patterns have been proposed that can be used embed the secret image inside a cover image. Scanning patterns are the patterns of accessing the pixels in the image. The scanning patterns used in this paper are raster horizontal, raster vertical, snake horizontal, snake vertical, Z horizontal and Z vertical.

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