Abstract
Least Significant Bit (LSB) is a common and popular technique for steganographic images, especially when the spatial domain of an image is considered. Because of its high quality of stego-image produced, this method is currently widely used and continues to be developed to date. The limitations of the LSB method are its simplicity and high predictability of inside secrets, so researchers try to improve the security of hidden messages in this way. This study proposes two layers of encryption and hiding stages. Here, first the message is encrypted by using a Secret key (extract from MSB) and double XOR operations using binary representation, and then an encrypted stream of bits is hidden into the cover image using the LSB technique. To ensure the quality of our proposed method, a well-known evaluation measure, such as MSE, PSNR, Entropy and histogram distribution, was calculated. Our experimental results show that our proposed method has acceptable results and it preserves the security of hidden text messages. Our best results achieved for PSNR and MSE are 55.67 dB and 0.18 respectively.