Steganography And Steganography In Prison

Steganography, or data hiding is the technique of embedding a message (pay¬load) in a medium (carrier), without causing suspicion about the existence of hidden data in the medium. The perturbations to the medium are carried out in such a manner that there is no perceivable noise component introduced. One way to illustrate the concept of steganography would be to analyze the Sim¬mons’ Prisoners’ problem. Two prisoners are allowed to communicate through a medium via an agent trusted by the warden. The prisoners’ are discouraged from discussing any plans of an escape from the prison. The warden himself, though, has a vested interest in letting them communicate as he wants to catch them in the act of Hatching an escape plan or by foiling their plans by modifying the message itself. …show more content…
In this case which involves an active warden, however, the message needs to look innocuous and hence cryptography fails. Steganography comes to the price¬owners, rescue. The prisoners’, with a strong intention of planning an escape, have already exchanged a code word before they were captured. They use this codeword to secretly exchange messages in the process deceiving the warden by hiding the message in plain sight. The codeword lets them embed and extract information. A possible technique would be to use the code word as a position compass for hiding and extracting letters of the message exchanged. The warden is oblivious to the existence of a secret message. The medium mentioned in the problem above could be photographically produced microdots used by espionage agents during World War II, a Bacon cipher that uses different typefaces to hide information or a digitally altered JPEG image hide using Steg hide. In all the above-mentioned methods the priority is to hide messages in plain sight and make the carrier look