What are Steganography in information security?


Steganography is an approach that facilitates concealing of a message that is to be kept secret inside other message. This result is the concealment of the secret message itself.

Steganography approach can be used to images, a video file or an audio file. Generally, however, steganography is written in characters such as hash marking, but its usage inside images is also common. At any rate, steganography secure from pirating possess materials as well as aiding in unauthorized viewing.

One use of steganography such as watermarking which hides copyright data within a watermark by overlaying documents not simply detected by the naked eye. This avoids fraudulent actions and provides copyright protected media more protection.

The main goal of steganography is to communicate securely in a completely indistinguishable manner and to prevent drawing suspicion to the transmission of a hidden information.

It is not to maintain others from understanding the hidden information, but it can maintain others from thinking that the information even exists. If a steganography method generate someone to suspect the carrier channel, thus the method has failed.

The basic model of steganography includes Carrier, Message and Password. Carrier is also called a cover-object, which the message is installed and serves to hide the existence of the message.

Message is the information that the sender wants to remain it confidential. It can be plain text, ciphertext, other image, or anything that can be installed in a bit stream including a copyright mark, a covert communication, or a serial number.

Password is called a stego-key. It can provide that only recipient who understand the correlating decoding key will be capable to extract the address from a coverobject. The cover-object with the secretly installed message is then known as the stego-object.

Recovering address from a stego-object needed the coverobject itself and a correlating decoding key if a stego-key was utilized during the encoding phase. The initial image may or may not be needed in most applications to extract the message.

There are several suitable carriers below to be the cover-object which are as follows −

  • Network Protocols such as TCP, IP and UDP.

  • Audio that using digital audio formats including wav, midi, avi, mpeg, mpi and voc.

  • File and Disk that can hides and append documents by utilizing the slack space.

  • Text including null characters, only alike morse code such as html and java.

  • Images file including bmp, gif and jpg, where they can be both color and grayscale.

In general, the information hiding procedure extracts redundant bits from coverobject. The process includes two steps which are as follows −

  • Recognition of redundant bits in a cover-object. Redundant bits are those bits that can be changed without corrupting the feature or failure the principle of the cover-object.

  • The embedding procedure choose the subset of the redundant bits to be restored with data from a secret message. The stego-object is produced by restoring the selected redundant bits with message bits.

Updated on: 11-Mar-2022

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