An efficient hybrid security mechanism based on chaos and improved BPCS

Commonly used security mechanisms such as cryptography and steganography suffer from weaknesses when used in a standalone manner. Extra efforts in the form of additional permutations/diffusions etc. result in higher ciphering/deciphering time complexity. Thus, there is a requirement for a security mechanism(s) which can provide adequate security without putting a considerable burden on ciphering/deciphering time complexity. This paper is an effort in this direction. The paper proposes a hybrid mechanism that employs chaotic based encryption scheme to encrypt data and an improved Bit-Plane Complexity Segmentation Steganography algorithm to embed the data. The proposed mechanism uses two new complexity measures to differentiate between noisy regions and simple ones appropriately. The scheme was implemented in MATLAB, and the simulation results show that the proposed mechanism has high embedding capacity, high security with a moderate decrease in PSNR value and is computationally fast.