A Review on Combined Techniques of Cryptography and Steganography using Color QR code

Abstract

In the internet eras, where security is main concern and access to any service is quite easy, the issue of cyber security aimed at protecting customer data and thus this leads to creation of such a safe environment where user can be ensured of safety and security of all fields which aftereffect the usage of cryptography and steganography has increased. Cryptography encrypts a message so it cannot be understood while the Steganography hides the message inside a cover medium so that it?s concealed. In this paper we use color QR (Quick Response) Codes which are 2-dimensional bar codes that encode data or text strings and color QR code for increase QR code capacity. They are able to encode the information in both vertical and horizontal direction, thus able to encode more information, for secret communication we combine the concepts of Cryptography and Steganography and color QR codes. We use Cryptography side for encrypting the message by a color QR code encoder and thus creating a color QR code, whereas steganography hides the color QR code inside a cover image, after the encryption process, the color QR code image which has the original data is watermarked over a cover image using Spatial domain (LSB) and transform domain (DCT& DWT). In reverse, De-Watermarking extracts and decrypts the color QR coded data image from the Stego- image to recover the original image.