A Hybrid Cryptographic and Steganographic Security Approach for Identity Management and Security of Digital Images

Privacy and security of image data are of paramount importance in our ever growing internet ecosystem of multimedia applications. Identity and security of image content play a major role in forensics and protection against media property theft. Copyright issues and ownership management as well as source identification within today’s cyberspace are very crucial. In our work, we proposed a hybrid technique of ensuring security of digital images as well as owner Identification by combining cryptographic and steganographic approaches. The steganography was used to embed a secret identification tag into the image which was engaged using a secret key. This was applied directly on the pixel values of the image used. The cryptographic technique was used to encrypt the image to conceal its visual contents. The implementation was done successfully and analysis of the output results was done using MATLAB.