  Retention of secrecy is one of the significant features during communication
activity. Steganography is one of the popular methods to achieve secret
communication between sender and receiver by hiding message in any form of
cover media such as an audio, video, text, images etc. Least significant bit
encoding is the simplest encoding method used by many steganography programs to
hide secret message in 24bit, 8bit colour images and grayscale images.
Steganalysis is a method of detecting secret message hidden in a cover media
using steganography. RS steganalysis is one of the most reliable steganalysis
which performs statistical analysis of the pixels to successfully detect the
hidden message in an image. However, existing steganography method protects the
information against RS steganalysis in grey scale images. This paper presents a
steganography method using genetic algorithm to protect against the RS attack
in colour images. Stego image is divided into number of blocks. Subsequently,
with the implementation of natural evolution on the stego image using genetic
algorithm enables to achieve optimized security and image quality.
