The transparent technology-Cryptography and Steganography
By: Bikramjit Saha
Tags: Cryptography, Transparent, Steganography, Technology

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Today in this vast world, everything seems transparent to us and is hard to detect what the real face lies behind any beautiful thing. Say it is in the case of normal people or different usable things we use in our daily life. The same is in the case of cryptography and steganography. Both methods are used as a mode of sending some private information in the form of some codes to one another so that normal people will not be able to detect and understand the real message hidden behind those codes.

Normally, Cryptography is just a method of sending any private message with the help of some unique codes which may be printed on different household things like coins, clothes, etc used as a model and is sent. The same is with steganography which is used to send those same unique codes through computerized files as a source, say it will be images or any type of files.

The very first use of this type of method was in 1900 B.C by ancient Egyptians where they used to send messages to the kings through private codes written in clothes, coins, and various household things that we normally use daily. The codes were written in such a way that normal people would not detect it and not be aware of that. After receiving the clothes, coins, and the things where the codes have been written on, they used to rub the place until and unless it would be clean and the hidden code is visible to the king. It was understood by the sender and the king only as some private message is hidden into it.

Slowly the traders and merchants started using it as they used to visit different places and were in contact with people of variate places. As the years passed, it came into focus as a major implementation of sending private messages between the sender and receiver.

Nowadays, cryptography has been used by different hackers in detecting and cracking different hidden codes and is a major field of interest for people to learn and get into this field. Also, it is used in securing network communications, protecting government properties, used in medical and financial aspects to store privacy, and even used in multiplayer games.

Also, it used by many to store personal information on personal computers like passwords. It is also used in crypto-currencies in making algorithms for digital wallets and many more stuff.

Talking about steganography, it is basically the extended version of what cryptography is and has been derived from it. Here the same process of sending different unique codes is sent but within a computerized file. It is mostly done by hiding that private data within an image. It looks exactly the same as the original image and is hard to detect, just a small minimal change in pixels will be there which doesn’t make any big sense in changing the whole picture. After all the picture remains look-alike and is hard to mark the changes through our eyes. That’s exactly where the advantage lies in using it.

Steganography can be performed on music files, text files, HTML files, and different kinds of file extensions that we normally use daily. It is basically used for hiding purposes and is used by many professional hackers, different organizations to hide their private contents publicly, and maintain their privacy.