A Survey on Cryptography and Steganography

Cryptography is an area, which is developed to provide security for the sender and receiver to transmit and receive confidential data through an insecure channel by a means of process called encryption / decryption. Cryptography ensures that the message should be sent without any alternation and only the authorized person can be able to open and read the message. A number of cryptographic techniques are developed for achieving secure communication. There are basically two techniques of cryptography symmetric and asymmetric steganography. Steganography can be defined as the study of invisible communication that usually deals with the ways of hiding the existence of the communicated message. The main objectives of steganography are undetectability, robustness (resistance to various image processing methods and compression) and capacity of the hidden data. This paper includes the detailed survey on the steganography techniques and encryption algorithm with their merits and demerits.