STEGANOGRAPHY OF ENCRYPTED MESSAGES INSIDE VALID QR CODES

Steganography is the technique of hiding secret data within an ordinary, non-secret, file or message in order to avoid detection; the secret data is then extracted at its destination. The use of steganography can be combined with encryption as an extra step for hiding or protecting data. In this paper, we present a QR code as a secret message to increase the embedding capacity and information security of the image steganography. We use quick response (QR)code. QR codes generated by our proposed system can carry its ordinary message in addition to the payload and with the use of LSB(Least significant Bit) method . Anyone can read the message, but the payload can only be obtained using a secret key. The message and the payload are unrelated; i.e. any message can be generated regardless of the payload and vise versa. We can take advantage of that by generating HMAC-XTEA algorithm, Hash based Message Authentication code (MAC) which involves a cryptographic hash functions and a secret key. So, if message that gives misleading information to the adversary. we test the proposed system and show that the generated QR code is (valid) i.e indistinguishable from an ordinary QR code which makes it look innocent and less susceptible.