Combining Steganography and Cryptography: New Directions

Our main goal in this paper is to give new insights and directions on how to improve existing methods of hiding secret messages, possibly by combining steganography and cryptography. We start by describing the main existing methods and techniques in steganography that allow us to hide the existence of a message, together with the mostly used steganalysis techniques to counter them. We then illustrate two different approaches that help us achieve a higher level of secrecy and security, together with their limitations. The first method is about combining steganography and cryptography in such a way to make it harder for a steganalyst to retrieve the plaintext of a secret message from a stego-object if cryptanalysis were not used. The second method does not use any cryptographic techniques at all and relies solely on steganographic ones.