A novel LSB based image steganography with multi-level encryption

Steganography is an art of hiding the existence of secret information by embedding it in a cover and hence preventing the unauthorized access of confidential information. This paper proposes a novel approach of encrypting the plain text into cipher text and embedding it into a color image. Encryption is done in two stages, during first stage it is encrypted by Ceaser cipher technique and in the second stage it is encrypted based on chaos theory. The cipher text obtained after encryption is embedded using 3, 3, 2 LSB replacement algorithm.