Abstract: The art of information hiding has become an important issue in the recent years as security of information has become a big concern in this internet era. Cryptography and Steganography play major role for secured data transfer. Steganography stands for concealed writing; it hides the message inside a cover medium. Cryptography conceals the content of a message by encryption. QR (Quick Response) Codes are 2-dimensional bar codes that encode text strings. They are able to encode information in both vertical and horizontal direction, thus able to encode more information. Genetic Algorithm basic function is to be used to generate the key values that can be used to encrypt the message so the detection of the message is complicated. In this paper a novel approach is proposed for secret communication by combining the concepts of Steganography and QR codes. The suggested method includes two phases: (i) encrypt the message by using the key values that is generated using genetic algorithm (ii) Hiding the encrypted message inside the QR code. Experimental result shows that the enhanced design of secure algorithm can be created which ensure improved security and reliability.

Keywords: QR, Cryptography, Steganography, Genetic Algorithm, Encode.