This paper aims at attaining high security in the transmission of secret data. This objective is met by implementing cryptography in addition to multi-layer steganography. The embedding of data is accomplished by implementing a reversible data hiding scheme using histogram shifting. Since this is a lossless method, no information is lost during the embedding and extraction process. The secret data to be embedded is first encrypted into a secret cipher using the RSA algorithm, and then embedded into the cover image. The encrypted message cannot be deciphered without the secret key thus increasing the security of the secret message. The embedding capacity is increased by adopting multi-layer embedding. © Research India Publications.