Applications of steganography

Steganography is an ancient science and the art of hiding information. Its counterpart, steganalysis, on the other hand, is the skill of detecting the hidden information. The growth of the Internet in recent decades created a battle field for both stego-counterparts, which resulted in profound influence on information security. In both sides of the battle, different and stronger tools have been developed to better meet the needs for the information security. The enhancement of these tools would benefit not only the national security and intelligence community, but also provide a wide range of services and applications used for peaceful purposes. The flexible process and the simple implementation of some of the steganographic methods offer various options for the users of this technology, and they can select the one that fits their needs. There is, however, a great difference between steganography and cryptography, as the former tries to hide the very existence of the secret message, while the latter only scrambles the information without hiding it. Secure communication and transmission of vital information are the essential needs of today's business environment, as well as the national security and intelligence community. This might be one of the important reasons for increasing significance of steganography m applications like banktransactions and battlefield communications, as conveying crucial information to intended recipients, while preventing access to others.