  Image Steganography is a growing research area of information security where
secret information is embedded in innocent-looking public communication. This
paper proposes a novel crystographic technique for grayscale images in spatial
domain. The secret data is encrypted and shuffled using pattern based bits
shuffling algorithm (PBSA) and a secret key. The encrypted data is then
embedded in the cover image using magic least significant bit (M-LSB) method.
Experimentally, the proposed method is evaluated by qualitative and
quantitative analysis which validates the effectiveness of the proposed method
in contrast to several state-of-the-art methods.
