Steganography (/ˌstɛɡəˈnɒɡrəfi/ ⓘ STEG-ə-NOG-rə-fee) is the practice of representing information within another message or physical object, in such a manner that the presence of the information is not evident to human inspection. Generally, the hidden messages appear to be (or to be part of) something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other cover text. The following is a list of techniques used in steganography.
Physical Hidden messages on a paper written in invisible ink. Hidden messages distributed, according to a certain rule or key, as smaller parts (e.g. words or letters) among other words of a less suspicious cover text. This particular form of steganography is called a null cipher. Messages written in Morse code on yarn and then knitted into a piece of clothing worn by a courier. Messages written on envelopes in the area covered by postage stamps. During World War II, Velvalee Dickinson, a spy for Japan in New York City, sent information to accommodation addresses in neutral South America. She was a dealer in dolls, and her letters discussed the quantity and type of doll to ship. The stegotext was the doll orders, and the concealed "plaintext" was itself encoded and gave information about ship movements, etc. Her case became somewhat famous and she became known as the Doll Woman. During World War II, photosensitive glass was declared secret, and used for transmitting information to Allied armies. Jeremiah Denton repeatedly blinked his eyes in Morse code during the 1966 televised press conference that he was forced into as an American prisoner-of-war by his North Vietnamese captors, spelling out "T-O-R-T-U-R-E". That confirmed for the first time to the US Naval Intelligence and other Americans that the North Vietnamese were torturing American prisoners-of-war. In 1968, crew members of the USS Pueblo intelligence ship, held as prisoners by North Korea, communicated in sign language during staged photo opportunities, to inform the United States that they were not defectors but captives of the North Koreans. In other photos presented to the US, crew members gave "the finger" to the unsuspecting North Koreans, in an attempt to discredit photos that showed them smiling and comfortable. In 1985, a klezmer saxophonist smuggled secrets into and out of the Soviet Union by coding them as pitches of musical notes in sheet music. The art of concealing data in a puzzle can take advantage of the degrees of freedom in stating the puzzle, using the starting information to encode a key within the puzzle/puzzle image. For instance, steganography using sudoku puzzles has as many keys as there are possible solutions of a Sudoku puzzle, which is 6.71×1021.
Printed Digital steganography output may be in the form of printed documents. A message, the plaintext, may be first encrypted by traditional means, producing a ciphertext. Then, an innocuous cover text is modified in some way so as to contain the ciphertext, resulting in the stegotext.
The letter size, spacing, typeface, or other characteristics of a cover text can be manipulated to carry the hidden message. Only a recipient who knows the technique used can recover the message and then decrypt it. Francis Bacon developed Bacon's cipher as such a technique. In the early days of the printing press, it was common to mix different typefaces on a printed page because the printer did not have enough copies of some letters in one typeface. Thus, a message could be hidden by using two or more different typefaces, such as normal or italic. During and after World War II, espionage agents used photographically produced microdots to send information back and forth. Microdots were typically minute (less than the size of the period produced by a typewriter). World War II microdots were embedded in the paper and covered with an adhesive, such as collodion that was reflective and so was detectable by viewing against glancing light. Alternative techniques included inserting microdots into slits cut into the edge of postcards. Printing introduces noise in the ciphertext, at times rendering the message unrecoverable. There are techniques that address this limitation, one notable example being ASCII Art Steganography.
Some types of modern color laser printers integrate the model, serial number, and timestamps on each printout for traceability reasons using a dot-matrix code made of small, yellow dots not recognizable to the naked eye — see printer steganography for details.
Social steganography In communities with social or government taboos or censorship, people use cultural steganography—hiding messages in idiom, pop culture references, and other messages they share publicly and assume are monitored. This relies on social context to make the underlying messages visible only to certain readers. Examples include:
Hiding a message in the title and context of a shared video or image. Misspelling names or words that are popular in the media in a given week, to suggest an alternate meaning. Hiding a picture that can be traced by using Paint or any other drawing tool.
Digital
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