TWO-LEVEL DATA SECURITY USING STEGANOGRAPHY AND 2D CELLULAR AUTOMATA

S.Saraswathi, V.Santhosh Raj, S.Sethuraman, J.Saravanan

Abstract: An important amount of personal data concerning vital information of a person is in the form of documents such as the Client documents of a Lawyer, Patient Reports of a Psychiatrist, Auditor documents and so on. A secure method is needed to store and transmit these data when required. These data should be maintained confidential from third party since revealing of these data might seriously affect the privacy of the persons involved. Encryption is mostly used to hide data from unauthorized access. Steganography is used to provide the first level of security and 2-D Cellular Automata to provide the second level of security. In the first level, data is encoded in the image and in the second level the encoded image is encrypted using 2-D Cellular Automata rules. The use of Cellular Automata rules is for the parallelism it provides during generation. It also provides high security during storing and transmitting, higher compression ratio and higher encoding of data when compared with the existing security technique.

Keywords: Cellular Automata; Security; Steganography

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2014.0319060