Investigators Guide to Steganography

What Is Steganography?

Steganography is a type of hidden communication that literally means "covered writing." The message is out in the open, often for all to see, but goes undetected because the very existence of the message is secret. Another popular description for steganography is "hidden in plain sight." In contrast, cryptography is where the message is scrambled, unreadable, and the existence of a message is often known.

Oftentimes throughout history encrypted messages have been intercepted but have not been decoded. While this protects the information hidden in the cipher, the interception of the message can be just as damaging because it tells an opponent or enemy that someone is communicating with someone else. Steganography takes the opposite approach and attempts to hide all evidence that communication is taking place. We will look at an example of this in the next section.