Hide and seek: an introduction to steganography

Although people have hidden secrets in plain sight-now called steganography-throughout the ages, the recent growth in computational power and technology has propelled it to the forefront of today´s security techniques. Essentially, the information-hiding process in a steganographic system starts by identifying a cover medium´s redundant bits (those that can be modified without destroying that medium´s integrity). The embedding process creates a stego medium by replacing these redundant bits with data from the hidden message. This article discusses existing steganographic systems and presents recent research in detecting them via statistical steganalysis. Here, we present recent research and discuss the practical application of detection algorithms and the mechanisms for getting around them.