

Substitution finds the least significant bits, and places the hidden document there. With injection, the idea is to find areas in the file that are not being used, like at the end of a song for example, and insert the data in that space. There are three basic ways: injection, substitution, and generation. Not only are there several programs that hide information, there are several different methods for doing so. It is not always used in a malevolent manner, some people just like to keep their private information secret, or use it as another way to encrypt important information, but the fact is that it can be used in a criminal way, and that is what the concern is about.
#Outguess original free#
There are over 100 free steganography programs, such as Outguess, available on the internet, and it is reported that there have been over 1 million downloads of this software, which goes to show how popular steganography is becoming. The problem is, there are so many methods to embed the information, it is hard to develop programs to distinguish between the different types. This is why there is now a growing interest in steganalysis, which is the detection of embedded data. It has become a threat not only to individuals and businesses, but to government agencies and homeland security, not just in the United States, but all across the world. It has been used for terrorism, fraud, espionage, etc. Most of the attention has been drawn now because of the malicious use of the technique. Steganography has become increasingly popular in the past years, due to the explosion of the internet and multi-media use in general. Now, steganography is the altering of bits in either an image, sound document, or even another document, to hide a message. Steganography has come a long way since those days. They also used invisible ink, null ciphers, and microdots to convey messages. It can be traced back for centuries, when messengers used to shave their heads, tattoo the message to their head, then wait until their hair grew back, travel to their destination, and finally shave their head again to reveal the message.Īnother technique that was used was etching a message in a wooden tablet, and then covering it with was. It originated with the Greeks, and it means “covered writing”. Generally, messages will appear to be something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other covertext and, classically, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter. The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on magic. The word steganography is of Greek origin and means “concealed writing”.

Steganography is the art and science of hiding information by embedding messages within other, seemingly harmless images or other types of media.
