Organisations need information security to reduce the risk of unauthorized information disclosure, use, modification and destruction. To avoid this risk and ensure security diverse solutions are available such as Cryptography, Steganography and Watermarking. Encryption changes the form of information but latter two hide records or watermark in some medium. This paper is an effort to explore one of the solutions i.e. Steganography. It is a mechanism of hiding secret information in text, image, audio or video carriers. Broadly, these are classified in various categories such as Spatial domain, Transform domain and Distortion Technique. This work intends to give an overview of above mentioned techniques in detail by comparing algorithms based on performance metrics such as Bhattacharyya Coefficient, Correlation Coefficient, Intersection Coefficient, Jaccard Index, MAE, MSE, PSNR and UIQI. After analysing the MATLAB simulation and comparison based on different performance metrics, LSB Substitution and Pseudorandom technique are best suited for generating highly matched stego image with respect to their cover image.

Confidentiality calls for substantial research and development in network security and data communication. Several techniques have been proposed for the past decades to ensure secure and confidential transmission of data. Steganography is a significant method of hiding data in another media, such that it is physically and virtually invisible. It is used primarily to ensure secure communication in an indiscernible fashion so that the hidden information is not discovered at any stage. The goal is to hide the presence of secret information rather than the contents of information to avoid breaching of data confidentiality. This paper is an effort to bring about a comparison of some of the recent techniques used for steganography on the basis of embedding capacity and Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), Universal image quality index (UIQI), Number of pixel change rate (NPCR) and correlation. The performance metrics undertaken are robustness, security analysis and perceptual quality. The techniques were implemented in MATLAB 2013a v 8.1.0.604.

The In today’s era with increase in the use of internet and networking devices, there is an increase in demand for more secure data communication. This problem has led to development of hybrid security mechanisms. Various techniques are available in literature that makes use of different steganography and cryptographic mechanisms which has certain pros and cons. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid security mechanism that tries to choose the best cryptographic and steganography mechanism. In addition, to increase the embedding capacity of the proposed mechanism, Huffman encoding scheme is used. The proposed strategy is implemented in MATLAB-09. In order to check the efficacy of the proposed technique three types of analysis were performed named as: security, robustness and efficiency analysis. It is found from the simulation and results that the proposed scheme outperforms other techniques in literature in every aspect.