In this world of communication, the security of the

messages to be transferred plays a very important role. Strategies like Encryption/Decryption, Digital Signatures, Steganography etc., have been developed to ensure the security, privacy and integrity of these messages. Playfair cipher is one of the well known polyalphabetic ciphers used for the encryption and decryption. However in account of few drawbacks inherent in existing 5*5 playfair cipher, recently improved version of Playfair cipher i.e., Extended 8*8 Playfair cipher has been developed. In this work, extended playfair cipher with Least Significant bit steganography are applied to hide the presence of any such messages. The main objective of this work is to build a secure mechanism of sending and receiving messages. The results show that combination of both extended 8 * 8 playfair cipher and stegnography increases the security of messages in contrast to the existing traditional Playfair ciphers.