Three Levels of Security Including Scrambling, Encryption and Embedding Data as Row in Cover Image with DNA Reference Sequence

Data security has become a more important and pressing issue as a result of the growing use of computers in everyday life and the unchecked growth of the internet. The unauthorized access to data is prevented by the use of new secure communication methods including cryptography and steganography. The proposed system consists of three levels to hide data inside colored images. The first level is to scatter the data through the use of the seed. The second level is to encrypt the scattered data into deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and match each two segments of the string with DNA reference sequence to produce set of index. The last level is to embedding the index set as a row inside the cover image. The results of the experiments proved the efficiency of the proposed system where the PSNR values ranged between (69.5616–82.9210).