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We are also surrounded by a world of secret communication, where people of all types are transmitting information as innocent as an encrypted credit card number to an online store. This dissertation is a contribution to the field of information security as new data hiding techniques are emerging to cope with the various challenges rising from the popularization of multimedia transmission, which have been widely applied for information protection, data monitoring and tracking, copyright protection, and source authentication. Stegacrypt first encrypt the text file and then employed a steganographic technique for hiding message bits into the parity bit of close colours in a palette by first calculating the distance between two colours in a palette using the Euclidean norm. The hidden message can then be decrypted using the secret key. This improved the security of the original method by using an approach that avoided the embedding of message bits into areas of the carrier image of uniform colour. The strength of any steganographic technique depends on the extent to which it can defy attacks.

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The author of this Dissertation holds M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. He currently resides in Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria where he lectures at the Department of Computer Engineering, University of Maiduguri

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