Abstract
The main aim of this technique is to prevent the capture of secret data during the exchange/transfer between the source and destination, without the knowledge of intruder. A secret message is represented as an image, and the same image is encrypted by the Triple Encryption (TE) technique. This can be divided into three types of processes. These processes are Reverse Matrix (RM) encode, Alpha-Encryption (AE) and Hill Cipher (HC) encryption. In the RM process, the original secret image is hidden within a cover image. The encoded cover image pixels are converted as characters using a lookup table in the AE process. The encrypted cipher characters are once again encrypted in the HC encryption process. The main advantage of this proposed technique is that, to strengthen the proposed technique the pixels positions are interchanged in every stage. After the encryption, the cipher's data are sent to the destination for the reconstruction process. The Triple Decryption (TD) technique is divided into three processes of: Inverse Matrix (IM) decode, Alpha-Decryption (AD) and HC decryption. The received cipher data are decrypted by the HC decryption and AD processes. Finally, the decrypted data is decoded by the IM decode process. In this process, the original secret and cover images are obtained. In addition, to measure the performance of the proposed algorithm, the standard parameters are considered. The results show that the proposed algorithm provided a high Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), good Correlation Coefficient (CC), minimum execution time and high CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity and Authentication) compared to existing encryption methods. Therefore, using this proposed method, we can obtain 100% of the original image and the secret data can be prevented from interception by intruders/third parties. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by IASE.