Developing an End-to-End Secure Emailing Add-in using Steganography

Abstract

Thanks to the emergence and spread of the internet, email is one of the main and fastest communication tools in both daily andbusiness life. The amount and the importance of data exchanged in emailing have been continuously increasing. This brings thesecurity-related issues. To be able to protect the security of the information, there has been a need to develop innovative ways.Although most email servers are already including some measures, there could some cases in which higher level security measureswould be needed. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end secure emailing add-in using the steganographic method, which involvescommunicating secret data in an appropriate multimedia carrier, e.g., image, audio, and video files. The purpose of the systemoutlined in this paper is to implement the concept of “information confidentially” through both steganographic and cryptographictechniques. This system is integrated into one of the most commonly used commercial emailing software, Microsoft Outlook as an add-in.