Encryption, Data Hiding, and Hostile Code

Running head : STEGANOGRAPHY

A Research on Steganography

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Introduction

The War on Terror has entered the Internet Age . Wikipedia mentions media citations that al-Queada operatives send encrypted s over an auction site on the Internet , as a means of exchanging plans for the next terror attack (2006 . Alarming , as it may seem , steganography is an effective security tool , when used properly . This is a concise narration on the evolving technology of steganography

Steganography is the art and science of disguising information with

the intent of hiding it from the unintended receiver . In a way , it is a form of encryption , because it hides the true information from the unintended recipient , but differs from it because the intention of steganography is to hide the presence of information itself , while the cryptographer merely limits the access , without hiding the fact that the information is present . In steganography , information appears to be something other than what is obvious to the innocent receiver

Origin and History of Methods

The technology has been existent since the 1500s , although the term is not as widely held . In fact , even the FBI report did not mention the word , steganography ' but referred to the evidences as a form of encryption (2001 . Nevertheless , the intended use of steganography dates back to ancient Greece , when secret messages were written on wooden tablets covered with wax or tattooed on shaved heads of slaves that later on grew hair to hide the message (Petitcolas , 2006 . In the course of WW2 , messages traversed enemy lines disguised in two-colored knitting yarn carrying a Morse code pattern . News articles were written on top of invisible ink , or typeset in a specified of microdots (Petitcolas , 2006

Throughout history , the methods used for steganography followed the communication technology of the era . During the birth of the World Wide Web , various modern methods of the trade rapidly arose . Firstly watermarking became a means of inserting a personal copyright on shared material . Image s store watermark in pixels that can be altered without affecting the overall image . The Least Significant Bit (LSB ) in any image can be altered by modifying its ASCII code , for example By doing so in a specific creates a hidden image or message within the picture . The bigger the , the more LSB can be modified to hide information . In the same approach , audio s , which are typically large , hide data in ressed portions of the . Amplification reveals hidden information in noise (Steganography , 2006

Secondly , when the of data is created in an otherwise dised data , this is a form of steganography . An example shared by Artz (2001 is to alter the use of ALT and NAME tags in programming a webpage (p .77 . Doing so will not change the information contained in the page but only the of the information , and can be used as an indicator of a private message

Lastly , the use of cipher text is the simplest yet...