Play Hide and seek with Data!

Warm greetings , so what does the title means?

Playing hide and seek with data?cool ...Let's play

Before getting into technical room shall we spend some time with history? well, may be 100 or 200 years ago people were lived in kingdom so obviously they might not have any rocket speed technologies that could pass information in fraction of seconds. Adding to the complexity, they had very countable ways to share the information across the countries which is very important to pass that in a secured manner. But how did they do that? Many sensitive information has been shared through secret code which is only understandable to sender and receiver.

That can be through drawing, poem,unique tattoos etc....Now at this modern age we follow the same method to pass sensitive information which is nothing but Steganography!

What is that? 🤔

Hiding the data in an ordinary file which won't like a secret message! for instance we see lot of images, videos and documents in the internet but do we know those are really a normal file or something which holds secret messages in that? Who knows, the posts which we come across also might have some secret messages in it.

To elaborate, let's consider that i have some secret message that needs to be shared to another person. I want that to happen in a very secret manner so i'm creating an image file or any other file format which is going to hide my data inside the pixels (if the medium is an image or video) .Now ,only me and the receiver will know that this ordinary file has a secret message which will not create any suspicion since it looks like a normal file.

Is this a only way to encrypt?🙄

No ,we have cryptography too

You might ask then what is difference between Cryptography and Steganography?

Well, Cryptography is nothing but a message will be shared to receiver in a encrypted way along with the decryption key. so only sender and receiver can see that message but the lower side is in cryptography the message is been sent with secret key which will not look like normal message so 3rd person can judge that some secret communication is going on. That does not make any sense right? if something is secret , then it should be like normal message at the same time it should also hold secret with it. That's why we have Steganography here!

Types of Steganography:

• Text Steganography

• Image Steganography

• Video Steganography

• Audio Steganography

• Network Steganography

Before jumping into its types let's understand some basic things that needs to be focused on

To elaborate in a detailed way , let's take image steganography as an example

• Transparency- The file should not reflect that it has some secret message, because that may lead to information leak or damage.

It should look like:

It shouldn't look like:

Steg original

• The data inside the file should not get affected while sharing/cropping the image

• It should be tamper resistance Meaning, it should not be vulnerable to attacks

How it works🧐?

It has its very own structure ,

• Cover file - X

• Secret Message - S

• Steganographic Encoder - [X+S+k(key)]

• Stego object

• Steganographic Decoder

Cover file is nothing but the image / file into which we are going to hide the secret message. As name comprise, Secret message is the one that needs to be shared in an encrypted way. By using Steganographic encoder the secret message has been placed in the cover file which will create stego object that looks exactly as like a normal image and it will be shared through communication medium. Once the receiver receives the object he/she can get that message by decoding the object with steganographic decoder.

As we all know that image composed of pixels which consist of bytes that is responsible for its color. like the same the texts also composed of bytes. Here, we are placing/hiding the text bytes inside the pixel bytes so the text will be encrypted inside an image.

This is how it is been mapped:

Tools for Steganography:

• Image Steganography

• Steghide

• Crypture

• rSteg

• OpenStego

We have even more tools but above mentioned are the best performing tools among others

Conclusion:

Hope you all got some basic idea about steganography, in upcoming posts we will be discussing about incorporating AI with Steganography for improving information security.

-Sree😜