# Image Steganography Using LSB and Hybrid Encryption Algorithms
## 1 Introduction  
In today's digital landscape, the escalating threat of malicious attacks targeting businesses, government entities, and private individuals has prompted a growing need for robust information security measures. As a result, developers and researchers are actively seeking technical solutions to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of documents transmitted over communication channels [1; 2]. With the rapid shift of numerous services from local networks to the Internet, the significance of information security and data protection has reached new heights. To counteract the evolving processing capabilities of cryptanalysis, encryption algorithms have undergone significant advancements to bolster their complexity, thereby deterring attackers from swiftly compromising encrypted data [3; 4]. It should be remembered that encrypted data always take an attacker's attention to try to crack the encrypted data as a challenge. Complex steganography techniques hide the data's existence, leading to fewer attacking possibilities. Steganography represents the technique of concealing data inside a cover medium, the origin of the word 'Steganography' is Greek, and it means 'hidden or covered writing'. Steganography mainly aims at concealing the very presence of the message inside the cover medium [5; 6; 7]. Its technique contains many secret communication methods that hide the mere fact of concealed data. Conventional methods include the usage of microdots, invisible inks, etc. The recent techniques of steganography attempt to take advantage of video files, digital media images, audio files, etc. Steganography can combine hiding and encryption mechanisms. This makes finding the data hidden in the object much more complicated since the data are unreadable, and any attacking techniques see the results as unexpectable and confusing [8; 9]. Therefore, much research has been conducted to enhance the hiding mechanisms, particularly as a message exchange mechanism for top-secret data. Some of the newest trendsare to use steganography as the initial phase of opening the secure tunnels instead of predefined certificates or private and public keys. As discussed earlier, steganography handles concealing data in a cover source. Moreover, steganalysis represents the science and art of revealing messages hidden through steganography, identical to cryptanalysis utilized in cryptography [10; 11; 12]. The objectives of steganalysis are to detect suspicious packages, find out whether there is a payload that is encoded into the packages and retrieve that payload. Therefore, the main challenges of efficient steganography are as follows: Many researchers have been working on steganography algorithms to make it difficult to detect/extract secret data by steganalysis and to make it difficult for the Human Visual System (HVS) to find a slight difference that happens on cover data such as audio, image, and video after the hiding process. In addition, the use of multi-level steganography has been increasing in recent years [6; 13]. The hiding efficiency and the hiding payload secret message are two crucial considerations that every effective and potent steganography system should consider. Researchers developed the first factor to satisfy the efficiency of the steganography scheme by making the visual quality of the stego image match with the cover image; when viewers notice any distortion that raises the likelihood of the attacker's suspicion, signalization is used. The user's requirements and the type of steganography scheme change these two [14; 15; 16]. This research aims to develop and design a very effective and efficient data hiding mechanism using the steganography technique with encryption algorithms to ensure confidentiality and integrity and to increase the security of the stego image by a method that does not show any difference in the image using visual attack tools. Also, the proposed approach is designed to generate a stego image with the lowest quality changes to avoid any visual attacks that can lead to the hidden message.