  Due to the widespread of advanced digital imaging devices, forgery of digital
images became more serious attack patterns. In this attack scenario, the
attacker tries to manipulate the digital image to conceal some meaningful
information of the genuine image for malicious purposes. This leads to increase
security interest about protecting images against integrity tampers. This paper
proposes a novel technique for protecting colored images against forgery and
pixel tamper. The proposed approach is designed as a hybrid model from three
security techniques, Message Digest hashing algorithm (MD5), Advanced
Encryption Standard-128 bits (AES), and Stenography. The proposed approach has
been evaluated using set of image quality metrics for testing the impact of
embedding the protection code on image quality. The evaluation results proved
that protecting image based on Least Significant Bit (LSB) is the best
technique that keep image quality compared with other two bit-substitution
methods. Moreover, the results proved the superiority of the proposed approach
compared with other technique in the literature.
