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1 I n t rod u c t i o n
Data security is the essential in the todays world of internet and networking. In any
organization information is critical. The popularity of the Internet offers a great convenience
to the transmission of a large amount of data over networks. Some of them may be secret
information which is candidate to unauthorized access. In todays world people are ready to
spent thousands and lacks of money in order to ensure high level of information security. In
spite of spending such a huge amount, still the objective of securing the information is not
achieved as the data some how gets in the hands of hacker. As the technology for securing
the data is advancing, hackers are also keeping pace with this technology. Hackers now
make use of certain algorithm or other techniques to decode the data encoded by the
senders.
In order to keep the unauthorized user away, variety of techniques have been
proposed, data encryption and data hiding are two main methods in data security.Data
encryption uses a certain algorithm to transform data into cipher text only the user that has
keys can decrypt the secret data from the cipher texts.For any unauthorized user who does
not have a key,the ciphertext will look like nothing but streams of meaningless code.
Although data encryption is a good way to secure data, it still has some weaknesses. The
appearance of cipher texts would give unauthorized user an impulse to recover them.
Moreover, the unauthorized users might even simply destroy the ciphertext out of range
when they have trouble recovering them so that the legal receivers cannot get the data in
time. That is the reason why data hiding has been researched recently.
Data hiding techniques embed the important data into multimedia data such as
images, videos or sounds. Digital images are considered good cover carriers because of their
insensitivity to human visual system.Watermarking and steganography are two major
branches of information hiding technology. Each has its own specific characteristics. The
first branch is used to embed a distinguishable symbol, e.g., a signature or a trademark, into
host signals to authorize the ownership of the signals. Here the size of the symbol usually
small, ranging from one bit to thousands of bits to represent the symbol. Watermarking
focuses on maintaining high robustness against attacks. It must ensure that the embedded
information can be successfully detected or extracted from the watermarked signals, even if
confronted with attacks such as filtering, resampling, lossy compression, etc. The second
branch (i.e. Steganography) is the art of covered or hidden writing. The word Steganography
comes from the Greek words steganos and graphia, which together means "hiding writing".
The purpose of steganography is covert communication to hide a message from a third party.
This differs from cryptography, which is intended to make a message unreadable by a third
party but does not hide the existence of the secret communication. Although steganography
is separate and distinct from cryptography, there are many analogies between the two, and
some authors categorize steganography as a form of cryptography since hidden
communication is a form of secret writing.

The digital steganography process has three basic components : 1) the data to be
hidden (secret data), 2) the cover file (covercarrier), in which the secret data are to be
embedded, and 3) the resulting stego-file (stego-carrier). In the literature, many techniques
for data hiding have been proposed. One of the common techniques is based on
manipulation the least significant bit (LSB) plans. A LSB substitution method replaces some
LSB of the cover-image with the secret data. In this project, a method have been proposed
based on LSB substitution. To prevent illicit access of the data and obtain better embedding
results, a key-permutation method with an optimal LSB substitution method is presented. A
random key is generated and then distributed to the communication parties. Before
embedding the data into the LSB of the cover image, it is represented with the help of the
key (encrypted) at the sending end; an opposite operation is then performed at the receiving
end to reveal the secret data. Optimization of the key is another phase of the proposed
model. It is achieved by selecting best embedding results for a set of all possible keys using
genetic algorithms are proposed method.
So, in the present work we try to embed some secret message inside any cover file in
encrypted form so that no one will be able to extract actual secret message. Here we use the
standard steganographic method i.e. changing LSB bits of the cover file. Our encryption
method can use maximum encryption number=64 and maximum randomization
number=128. The key matrix may be generated in 256! Ways. So in principle it will be
difficult for anyone to decrypt the encrypted message without knowing the exact key matrix.
Our method is essentially stream cipher method and it may take huge amount of time if the
files size is large and the encryption number is also large. The merit of this method is that if
we change the key text little bit then the whole encryption and decryption process will
change. This method may most suitable for water marking. The steganography method is
further secured by compressing the secret message first and then encrypting it and then
finally embedding it inside the cover file.

1.2 Problem Definition

For some current applications User-Id and password are not protected. As a result
any one who is interested in using the application can access it. Also sending a plain text of
data to the receiver is not secure. Since the data is readable any one can get the information.
Even if the message is encoded before sending the message, it can be decoded by the hacker
by making use of certain algorithm.
Some times the systems may not be connected properly. As a result the data which is
transferred may not reach the destination is proper format. Also it is very difficult to
maintain reliability of the software. The reliability comes with the cost. When the message
falls in the hand of the hacker then the hacker can insert, delete or modify the content of the
original message. The confidentiality of the message is lost if the message is not protected
properly. A hacker can pose as sender and can misguide the receiver. Thus hacker can
violate the authentication.
In some cases hacker are not able to get the content of the original message. Thus
they perform the exponential attack. Exponential attack is the attack where the hacker
destroys the content of the original message.

1.3 Existing Systems

There are many products available in market which does the work similar to what
our project does but none of them are accurate or fully automated. Most of these
applications are available on the Internet. As each and every person does not have internet or
may not use internet for their daily routine so such an application would not be easily
available for use to them. Moreover they are charged very high for single use.
For current applications User-Id and password are not protected. As a result any one
who is interested in using the application can access them. Sending a plain text of data to the
receiver is not secure. Since the data is readable any one can get the information.
It is very difficult to maintain reliability of the software. The reliability comes with the cost.
In some cases hacker are not able to get the content of the original message. Thus they
perform the exponential attack. Exponential attack is the attack where the hacker destroys
the content of the original message. The existing systems does not have provision to hide
data into audio/video files. Also transferring of data is not possible within a network or
internet

1.4 Proposed System

The main objective for developing this application is that, it can provide the user
with security of data. It will also provide the transfer of data from one machine to another in
the form of a file. Only the authorized user and administrator can access the application.
The project Steganography will basically deal with data security. It will provide
security of data by mechanism which is popularly known as Steganography in the world of
internet security. It will embed any text data into any other suitable file such as image,
audio, video, text file, without actually changing the content of the carrier file. It will also
allow user to transfer the file containing the information to other machine through LAN.
Consequently will also retrieve the information from file in which information is
embedded. It will also provide a mechanism for embedding a whole text file in other files.
It will provide the mechanism to retrieve the text file as it was embedded without changing
the format or look of the file in which it was embedded.

1.5 Features of Proposed System

The proposed system would be capable of identifying the authorized and unauthorized users. It would be capable of embedding text message into image file, audio file
and video file. Before embedding the message, the message would be first encrypted.
On embedding the message, the format and look of the image, audio, video would not be
distorted. After embedding the message, it would retrieve the message from the file in the
same format in which the message was previously embedded. It would also decrypt the
message which was encrypted by the sender. After retrieving the message from the file, the
look and the format of the image, audio, video would not change. It would be capable of
embedding the whole text file into the image file, audio file and the video file, so that user
could be able to embed large message in the form of text file. After retrieving the file from
the image, audio, video file which holds the message the format of the image, audio, video
file would not change. There would be mechanism for alerting the receiver when any file is
send to him. There would be mechanism for alerting the sender when any file is accepted by
the receiver. There would be mechanism for alerting the sender if any file is rejected by the
receiver. Since this software is responsible for the data security, the software should be safe
enough that it does not get miss-used.

1.6 Conclusion
This project will basically implement the Steganographic technique of hiding the
data or information behind the image/audio/video file. It will also help in the transfer of the
information from one machine to another machine. The performance of the system would be
evaluated, and will be much more efficient than the existing system. It will meet the primary
requirements of the concern. The main aim of this project will be the data security aspect.