Image steganography stands out as a prominent method for securely concealing information and digital data. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), specifically the 256-bit version, has emerged as a cornerstone in cryptographic algorithms, providing a robust foundation for secure data communication and storage. This paper explores the integration of AES-256 and Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography to enhance data security significantly. While attackers typically target the weakest link in a system, which is often not the encryption itself, AES-256 is considered highly secure. However, the vulnerability lies in the key, which utilizes the Grounded Key Derivation Function (PBKDF2) [2]. The proposed system in this paper advocates for the use of PBKDF2 over other key derivation methods to reduce susceptibility to brute force attacks. With PBKDF2, hackers are limited to making a relatively small number of guesses per second, depending on the configuration, significantly enhancing security. Strengthening passwords is crucial for thwarting attacks such as dictionary and brute force attacks. Normal users can take an equal amount of time to deduce a password by applying a Key Derivation Function (KDF) to a well-chosen password, while the system applies CPU-intensive procedures on the attacker's side. The AES encryption generates a key using PBKDF2, and the data is translated with this hexadecimal key. The resulting cipher text, an encrypted and non-understandable text, is then embedded into an image using LSB steganography.
This code uses a salt hashing technique with AES algorithm to separeate the odd and even characters of plain text and encrypt it to store in the pixels of cover image