A SECURE MAIL APPLICATION USING STEGANOGRAPHY AND VISUAL CRYPTOGRAPHY

Abstract

Although there are recent advancements in the development of messengers, Emails are the most widely used and popular messaging system used by the Internet users, which helps them to communicate in a short span of time. Security to the Email messages is an important issue as no Internet Standards provides security to the message content. The existing system, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) used to encrypt and decrypt email messages, has a drawback of adaptive chosen cipher text attack as it works in CFB encryption mode as used by OpenPGP. To improve the security of email messages, a new model is proposed called as “A Secure Mail Application using Steganography and Visual Cryptography”. The email message to be transmitted is converted to an image and shares are generated using (2, 2) Visual Cryptographic Technique. One of the shares is kept with the server and other is sent to the receiver’s mail box. Man in the middle attack is not possible as these shares are transmitted through different medium. At the receiver side, two shares are fetched and decrypted to get the image. From this image, the original message is reconstructed. One added advantage of the system is that it ensures security of the shares by using AES algorithm, a symmetric key encryption method. The use of Image Steganography to construct an image from the message and use of Visual Cryptography provides secure email messaging.