Steganography

In the last decade, cryptography has been rampant as the world becomes more and more with the idea of securing data. As technology advances and people keep more of their data online, highly encrypted software like Bitlocker and OpenSSL and even common messaging platforms such as Whatsapp become more prevalent. This structure enhances data security, making it highly resistant to malicious hacking. While encryption conceals the content of a message, it doesn't hide the message's presence itself. That’s exactly where steganography comes in.

The main difference between steganography and encryption lies in the fact that the message’s presence remains hidden. For instance, in regions that carry rather strict privacy laws and free speech might be censored, steganography could be beneficial as the message could evade the eye of the government. An example of how censorship could be bypassed is by putting the message within an innocent image, sending it to someone, and having them encode the message later on. Despite the benefits of steganography seeming to outweigh encryption, there are some situations where the latter is better: the most obvious being data storage.

To truly understand the true potential of steganography, it’s vital to understand just how it works. To begin, lets do a quick review of the binary number system. Below is an 8-bit number representing 123 in decimal

0111 1011

The very first number, 0 (from left to right), is considered to be the most significant bit, in the sense that if you change that number it changes the value the most compared to the rest of the bits. On the other end, if you change the very last number, 1, you change the value the least, hence why it’s referred to as the least significant bit. Therefore, in order to not distort the picture itself by much, messages are oftentimes masked within the lowest bits or the least significant bits. In this sense, the overall picture itself will not look different to the human eye but it still hides the message within it.

All in all, steganography has been a huge deal in the past and even now. However, more machine learning algorithms have been tuned to be on the lookout for steganographic content. As a result, the future of steganography will look completely different than the past.