Abstract:

The global growth of the e-commerce industry has heightened concerns among consumers, businesses, , and financial institutions regarding fraud while using credit and debit cards and safeguarding personal information. It is necessary to secure information disseminated over insecure channels to prevent unauthorized access. Cryptography and steganography are widely used for this purpose. However, completely relying on the combined usage of both may not be enough in today’s world, resulting in weak security. By combining visual cryptography, more levels of security can be added, thus boosting the security of secret information. This study suggests a data security framework that employs multiple levels of security for information. At the first level of security, cryptography is used to encrypt the secret information, and at the second level of security steganography is used to conceal the encrypted text. After that, visual cryptography is applied, which generates the shares of the image obtained. Finally, image steganography is used to hide the generated shares in different color images. When used together, these data security methods greatly improve the secrecy, trustworthiness, and effectiveness of secret messages. The precision of text is determined through Mean Square Analysis (MSE) and correlation coefficient, which involves a comparison of sent and received text. MATLAB environment is used for the implementation.

Key words: encryption, decryption, cryptography, steganography, visual cryptography, security, cyber data