SUMMARY
This work presents and describes a novel method to hide messages in images in a hybrid manner, as steganography is combined with quantum cryptography. Through stimulating and implementing this hybrid approach, the least significant bit (LSB) substitution is employed for hiding secret messages within cover images that consist of three bands (Red, Green and Blue), after which the output is encrypted using quantum one-time pad encryption. The models are illustrated explicitly and tested. In addition, the test analysis uses a steganalysis tool called StegExpose to detect LSB steganography in images. The experimental results proved that the image hiding is reliably secure and undetectable, and hence the proposed new hybrid model provides a sufficient security level as well as we have tested the proposed system using robust state-of- the-art steganalysis techniques and found the low payload threshold maintained in the proposed system produces a high margin of communication security safety. No payload files were detected (0% detections), despite each file containing the entire content of the information as embedded text.