Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 What is Steganography?

Steganography comes from the Greek and literally means, "Covered or secret writing". Although related to cryptography, they are not the same. Steganographys intent is to hide theexistence of the message, while cryptography scrambles a message so that it cannot beunderstood.

Steganography is one of various data hiding techniques, which aims at transmitting amessage on a channel where some other kind of information is already being transmitted.This distinguishes Steganography from covert channel techniques, which instead of tryingto transmit data between two entities that were unconnected before. The goal of Steganography is to hide messages inside other harmless messages ina way that does not allow any enemy to even detect that there is a second secret message present. The only missing information for the enemy is the short easily exchangeablerandom number sequence, the secret key, without the secret key, the enemy should nothave the slightest chance of even becoming suspicious that on an observed communicationchannel, hidden communication might take place. 1.2 Introduction to Terms used: In the field of steganography, some terminology has developed.The adjectives Cover , Embedded And

stego were defined at the Information HidingWorkshop held in Cambridge, England. The term ``cover'' is used to describe the original, Dept. of E& C VKIT