The History of Steganography

David Kahn

120 Wooleys Lane

Great Neck, New York 11023

This is an extremely interesting and a very important conference - - the first

of its kind. I salute the people who had the idea of doing it. It may go down as
a landmark conference in the history of cryptology.
I am going to talk to you today about the history of steganography. Steganog-
r a p h y deals with the hiding of messages so that potential monitors do not even
know t h a t a message is being sent. It is different from cryptography where they
know t h a t a secret message is being sent. The latter might consist of a message
like ZQVBL, while the former might use secret ink.
The origin of steganography, it seems to me, is biological or physiological.
Examples of what we call steganography today abound in the animal kingdom.
W h e n dogs a t t e m p t to do something secret and are caught, they sometimes look
a little ashamed. Among chimpanzees or wolves, when beta males want to mate
with the females of alpha males they will try to do it in a surreptitious way.
So secret and suppressed methods of communication and of action exist among
animals.
In the human world, children pass notes in school so that the teacher won't
catch them. In criminal human behaviour, plotters a t t e m p t to do things in a
secret way and not in an overt way.
Steganography conceals the very existence of the secret message. It's there-
fore broader than cryptography, but there's no theory yet, as far as I know, of
steganography.
T h e root metaphor - - as some philosophers would say - - of steganography
is a hiding place. Messages can be communicated not only through space but
also through time. For example, turtles will bury eggs - - that's kind of a secret
message through time. People will bury treasure.
T h e term steganography itself means "covered writing" - - it comes from the
Greek aTeTczvw. Cryptography means "secret writing". Steganography seems
to me connected to a great extent with protection. Still protection is only an
accompanying characteristic not necessarily a defining one.
Perhaps because of steganography's biological roots, we can go far back in
history and find examples in which steganography has been used. Herodotus,
the father of history, gives several cases. A man named Harpagus killed a hare
and hid a message inside its body. He sent it with a messenger who pretended
to be a hunter.
 One Histaieus wished to inform his friends that it was time to begin a revolt
against the Medes and the Persians. He shaved the head of one of his trusted
slaves, tattooed the message on the head, waited till his hair grew back, and
sent him along. It worked: the message got to his correspondents in Persia, the
revolt succeeded. Things worked more slowly in the days before faxes and email!
Herodotus also tells of a man named Demeratus who wanted to report from
the Persian court back to his friends in Greece that Xerxes the Great was about
to invade Greece. He concealed his message under writing tablets. These were
usually two pieces of wood, hinged as a book, with each face covered with wax.
One wrote on the wax; the recipient melted the wax and reused the tablet.
Demeratus' technique was to remove the wax, write the message on the wood
itself, and re-cover it with wax. He then sent the apparently blank tablets to
Greece.
At first nobody could figure out what they meant. Then a women named
Gorgo guessed that maybe the wax was concealing something. She removed it
and became the first woman cryptanalyst. Unfortunately her ingenuity had fatal
consequences for her husband Leonidas, the King of Sparta; he died with the
band of Greeks holding off the Persians at Thermopylae.
Aeneas the Tactician, who wrote on military matters including secret com-
munication, invented the astrogal. He a ball or a cube of material, maybe wood,
and drilled holes in it. Each hole represented a particular letter. He passed
thread through these holes to spell out the message. The recipient had to un-
ravel it carefully, noting the successive holes through which the thread passed,
then reverse the sequence to read the secret message. The hope was that if it
were intercepted, it might be regarded as a toy or game.
Another idea he proposed was putting almost invisible pin pricks above the
letters of an innocuous message. This device was used all the way through the
Renaissance, and even in World War 1 the Germans pricked letters in magazines.
In other cases, they dotted letters with invisible ink which then had to be heated
to show the plaintext letters.
Harpagus' hare technique was refined - - or brutalized - - in the Renaissance.
Giovanni Batista Porta, one of the great cryptologists of his time, proposed
feeding a message to a dog and then killing the dog when you wanted to get this
message. Would the RSCPA permit that today?
An important technique was the use of sympathetic inks. They are very old,
appearing in the classical literature. Ovid in his "Art of Love" suggests using
milk to write invisibly. To develop it, the recipients sprinkles soot or carbon
black on the paper and it will stick to the milk residue. Most of the early inks
were simply organic fluids which upon being heated very gently with a candle
would char and reveal the secret message.
Later, chemically affected sympathetic inks were developed. These were
chemicals that could be treated with other chemicals causing a reaction that
would make the result visible. Some of these were known very early on in clas-
sical times; Pliny mentions some of them. One is gallotanic acid made from gall