What is the comparison between Steganography and Obfuscation in Information Security?


Steganography

Steganography is the procedure of hiding data, images, or audio messages within another element of information, image, or audio. Steganography is the art of hiding data.

In computer science, it can define hiding information within a message or file. It serves a similar objective to cryptography, but rather than encrypting information, steganography easily hides it from the user.

Invisible ink is an instance of steganography that is different to computers. A person can address a message with clear or "invisible" ink that can only be view when another ink or liquid is used to the paper.

Similarly, in digital steganography, the main goal of digital steganography is to hide data from users except those who are meant to view or hear it.

Digital steganography is a popular approach for embedding messages within a medium like an image, audio, or video and hiding it from undesirable eyes. While malicious hackers use this procedure to ignore security measures, they are not the only ones who need steganography approach.

In steganography, it plays an important role in information security. It is very beneficial for sending the information secretly from one point to another without letting anyone understand that the other or critical document has been sent. In organizations, information security has to be prioritized as it can represent the organization’s reputation.

Obfuscation

Data obfuscation is the procedure of replacing responsive information with data that looks like real production data, creating it useless to malicious actors. It can be basically used in test or development environments developers and testers required realistic information to construct and test software, but they do not required to view the real information.

Data obfuscation is important in some regulated industries where personally identifiable data should be secured from overexposure.

By obfuscating data, the organization can expose the information as required to test teams or database management without compromising the information or getting out of compliance. The main advantage of data obfuscation is reducing security risk.

The feature of Obfuscation is as follows −

  • Masking out is an approach to create multiple versions of the data with a same structure. The data type does not modify, only the value modify.

  • Data can be changed in a number of methods. For example, it can be changing numbers or letters, replacing words, and switching partial information between records.

  • Data encryption uses cryptographic methods, generally symmetric or private/pub key systems to codify the information, creating it completely unusable until decrypted.

  • Encryption is very secure, but when it can encrypt the data, and it cannot manipulate or analyze it.

  • Data tokenization replaces specific information with meaningless values. However, authorized users can connect the token to the original information.

  • Token data can be used in production environments, for example, it can execute financial transactions without the need to send a credit card number to an external processor.

Updated on: 14-Mar-2022

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