Abstract
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.