The Origin of Steganography
What is it?
Steganography in simple words is hiding a message or set of messages which are secretive above a physical object like hiding a small piece of paper in a notebook . In electronic terms it is hiding computer files , images , text , audio within another file , message or audio video or a mix of both .
There might be a confusion that will arise cryptography uses hash function to encrypt so that nobody can view the message without the particular decrypt key and steganography we say we hide behind one another the difference is that cryptography the data structure is altered while stegano maintains the same structure and it’s just hiding from plainsight view complex techniques is also there but crypto is most commonly used .
How it all originated ?
The first use of steganography was by greeks although the chinese had few traces if it . The messenger head was shaved and then the required content was return on the scalp , once the hair has grown he is sent and information is read accordingly. Even more to add the warning for a war is also notified by writing directly on the wooden backing of a wax tablet before applying it’s beeswax surface
The story of Mary Queen of Scots Cipher :
Mary was in jail obviously in jail we are not connected to the outside world so in order to communicate with other people out and also not know what she talks about she started using codes all she did was substitution if it’s A it’s D and so on . So the people who decrypt it if they were able to identify the message clearly. As we know there are 2 ways of hiding messages one is Steganography and cryptography
The early stages of stego is hiding messages through combinations of onion and milk so only when we place it near a burning candle we can read the message properly other one is with the combination of vinegar and lime . Although these are differentiated from literal stego and called as Watermarking. The disadvantage she faced is once the messenger gets caught and its discovered then it’s a total waste so she had to find a different way and that’s how we ended in cryptology . Cryptology doesn’t hide the existence but it’s makes the letter meaningless so that nobody understands that and that’s the end result of basic cipher called Substitution cipher.
She used over 100 of ciphers for daily communication and had a pattern of codes. When it comes to stego part the codes or ciphers were hidden in a beer barrel as it came from home the messages went directly to them and communication happened accordingly .
Finally the plan to kill queen elizabeth was wrote in a letter and babington was the man behind it and he sent those to jail . The persons who delivers the messages was asked to decipher and read to mary . So when he read that the prison officer immediately altered people and she was put to death
How this stego work ?
It works by replacing some parts of useless or unused data might be changing the file signature from pdf to zip or replacing any bit with another or feed in both dump and original data into the files that are properly structured
Few examples :
- Playing a video at a faster frame rate to unveil a hidden message.
- Inserting a message in the red, green, or blue channel of an RGB image.
- Playing an audio track backward to reveal a hidden message.
- Encrypting a message or image within a photo through the addition of noise or sound.
- Hiding information with the file header or metadata.
- Inserting image behind image to conceal the final message
- Hiding in hidden areas of a web page or in robots.txt files
This is the whole story behind stego the techniques and types of it will be covered in later sections..
