Digital data security using encryption

Digital data account to 70% of the information is transmitted on the internet. Data security is the means of ensuring that data is kept safe from unauthorized. Thus data security helps to ensure privacy and protecting personal data that can be achieved by encryption.

Encryption is the process of transforming information (referred to as plaintext) using an algorithm (called cipher) to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. Encryption has long been used by militaries and governments to facilitate secret communication. Encryption is now commonly used in protecting information within many kinds of civilian systems.

In-order to secure data, the need of developing various encryption schemes is increasing exponentially. We focus on the digital encryption of images. Digital data can be secured by two methods of encryption namely Digital Cryptography and Visual Cryptography..

We developed a novel lossless digital encryption system that is capable of encrypting image of arbitrary size and format (binary, gray, or color) into a robust encrypted image. In addition, use of logical transforms (key to encrypt) made the execution of our program much faster. Visual Encryption is a cryptographic technique that allows any visual data (picture, text image etc.) to be encrypted such that the decryption can be done by human visual system (overlapping the encrypted images). We investigated on various visual encryption techniques and tested them on real images. We combined these techniques to implement in real time, and can be further improvised in the future.