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Introduction
In today’s world, keeping the digital information safe from being misused is one of the
most important criteria. This issue gave rise to a new branch in computer science, named
Information Security. Although new methods are introduce…
Introduction
In today’s world, keeping the digital information safe from being misused is one of the
most important criteria. This issue gave rise to a new branch in computer science, named
Information Security. Although new methods are introduced every day to keep the data
secure, but computer hackers and unauthorized persons are always trying to break those
methods or protocols to fetch the sensitive beneficial information from those data. For
this reason, computer scientist and cryptographers are trying very hard to come up with
permanent solutions to this problem (Somdip Dey, 2012).
Steganography is the practice of hiding private or sensitive information within something that appears to be nothing out of the usual. Steganography is often confused with cryptology because the two are similar in the way that they both are used to protect important information. The difference between the two is that Steganography involves hiding information so it appears that no information is hidden at all. Steganography in the modern day sense of the word usually refers to information or a file that has been concealed inside a digital Image, Video, Text or Audio file.
Like many security tools, steganography can be used for a variety of reasons, some good, some not so good. Legitimate purposes can include things like watermarking images for reasons such as copyright protection. Digital watermarks (also known as fingerprinting, significant especially in copyrighting material) are similar to steganography in that they are overlaid in files, which appear to be part of the original file and are thus not easily detectable by the average person. Steganography can also be used as a way to make a substitute for a one-way hash value (where you take a variable length input and create a static length output string to verify that no changes have been made to the original variable length input). Further, steganography can be used to tag notes to online images (like post-it notes attached to paper files). Finally, steganography can be used to maintain the confidentiality of valuable information, to protect the data from possible sabotage, theft, or unauthorized viewing.
Unfortunately, steganography can also be used for illegitimate reasons. For instance, if someone was trying to steal data, they could conceal it in another file or files and send it out in an innocent looking email or file transfer. Furthermore, a person with a hobby of saving pornography, or worse, to their hard drive, may choose to hide the evidence through the use of steganography. And, as was pointed out in the concern for terroristic purposes, it can be used as a means of covert communication. Of course, this can be both a legitimate and an illegitimate application.
