A Novel Approach for Data Security for Cloud Data using Image Steganography and Genetic Algorithms

Cloud Computing is a powerful, flexible, cost efficient platform for providing IT services over the Internet. However Cloud Computing has various levels of risk factors because services are maintained by third party vendors and the most important information is handled by third party, so harder to maintain the security. Steganography is the one of the technique to provide security for secret data in inserting an image or video. In the most of the steganographic algorithms secret data is inserted in Least Significant Bit of an image but the hackers easily detect the algorithm and hack the secret data easily. In this paper proposed an approach based on the heuristic genetic algorithm for hiding secret data in the original image and instead of considering only Least Significant Bit and we also consider Most Significant Bit with the help of Image Segmentation technique. The proposed approach will be tested and analyzed for various color and gray scale images of different sizes for different length of secret messages. The performance of the proposed approach will be analyzed with various parameters like PSNR, MSE and the results are good compared with existing algorithms.