Compare and contrast different types of Steganography methods that are used for hiding the confidential data. Steganography: Comparing Techniques for Hiding Confidential Data

Steganography: Comparing Techniques for Hiding Confidential Data

Steganography, a method that hides confidential information in other files so it cannot be found is an old and trusted technique. Steganography is becoming more common as digital information becomes more accessible. Two main methods of steganography are used nowadays: masking techniques and transforming technologies.   Masking techniques involve replacing the least significant bits (LSBs) within a digital carrier file raw message in order to encode the confidential data in a way that’s almost undetectable. Some examples of such techniques are frequency domain based technologies (Cheddad, et.al., 2015) and spatial domain to hide images (Shah et.al., 202).   The use of transform techniques allows confidential data to be encrypted into digital media. This involves transforming confidential data into an opaque form, making it more difficult to identify. Diffused images (Ahmed and colleagues, 2021), as well as chaotic adaptive encryptions (Ghosh, et.al., 2015) are two examples of such techniques.  Although both masking techniques and transforming methods have their use in steganography (and they can each be useful), masking is the more simple and straightforward of the two. Transforms require complex algorithms and more complicated transformations.   Masking and transforming are both useful for hiding confidential data. However, the decision about which technique to use will depend on the specific application.   References  Ahmed, S. K., Waziri, U. U., Dahir, M. A., & Ibrahim, A. I. (2021). A cost-effective method to protect confidential data with diffused images or steganography. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer 223, 106832.   Cheddad, A., Condell, J., Curran, K., Mc Hugh, J., & McCormac, J. (2015). Review and analysis of the current digital image steganography methods. Signal Processing, 114, 8–23.   Ghosh, S., Sen, T., & Pal, D. (2015). Use steganography-based chaotic adaptive encryption to hide confidential data. International Journal of Soft Computing and Engineering 5, 274-279.  Shah, A., Ahmed, S. M., Henezes, J., Akbar, M., & Jabeen, R. (2021). An improved spatial domain method for secret information hiding. Mathematics, 9(3), 500.Cont…