Steganography is basically a data-hiding technique, its the art of hiding secret files or messages within seemingly harmless files (to avoid raising any suspicion).
Steganography, in Greek, means “covered writing”.
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Uses of Steganography
A piece of data or information hidden into a image or sound file is extremely difficult to catch. Steganography can be applied to virtually any digitized audio, graphics, or text file. It can be used to create covert channels for private communications, digital signatures for file authentication (digital watermarking or copyrighting), and more.
Is It Cryptography?
You may already be aware of encryption/cryptography but it primarily deals with protecting the contents of a message, the existence of the message is usually obvious in this case. Steganography, on the other hand, is more about concealing the fact that a secret message is being sent.
How Is It Implemented?
An important aspect of Steganography is that it should be implemented in such a way that it shouldn’t attract obvious attention to itself.
Here’s how its implemented in modern digital steganography:
- Data is first encrypted by the usual means
- Its then inserted, using a special algorithm, into the redundant bits of a file, mostly JPEG images.
- By applying the encrypted data to this redundant data in a non-conspicuous way, the end result doesn’t look a lot different from the original.
Steg-analysis and decryption techniques can be used to detect and remove hidden data stored within images.
Steganography has gained a significant amount of press over the past several years when the technique hit the press as a possible method that many of the terrorists involved with the 9/11 attacks used to plan the operation. Similar to the use of encryption, steganography techniques have become one of the basic methods that organizations or individuals can keep information confidential for a given time frame. In many cases, although the technique can be deciphered or decrypted in a given time frame given sufficient resources, it can provide operational security for tasks that don’t require long-term privacy of the protected.
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