HIGHER LEVEL SECURITY APPROACH FOR DATA COMMUNICATION SYSTEM BASED ON AES CRYPTOGRAPHY AND DWT STEGANOGRAPHY

Cryptography is used for secured data transmission, but the resulting unreadable messages usually attract other’s attention, so steganography is employed to hide the secret information to prevent attackers from discovering the presence of secret data. This paper proposes an improved technique that combines both Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm for cryptography and steganography and takes the advantages of using the high frequency coefficients of the cover image by applying the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT).The proposed technique is employed to study the effect of hiding the encrypted secret message in 24-bit RGB image. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) analysis, the payload embedding capacity and the histogram distribution analysis. Comparison to other four associated works will be offered. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method gives a secure technique for data hiding and shows robustness against different attacks.