Steganography: A Security Model for Open Communication

Steganography is the art and science of hiding messages. Steganography is basically about embedding a secret message in an innocuous wrapper; to communicate privately in an open channel. Steganography is often combined with cryptography so that even if the message is discovered it cannot be read. The key difference between Cryptography and Steganography lies with the fact that when a message is encrypted, third party knows that the message exists and it is encrypted, whereas with Steganography third party might not even know (or observe) that there does exists a message too, simply because its hidden behind an image, video or an audio etc which without keen observation might go without any suspicion. In the proposed system Steganography involves the method of acquiring insignificant bits in the audio file. After acquiring the insignificant bits in the audio header, replace them with significant bits (covert message) of information hiding[6]. Video file consists of both audio and images so the above two methods can be combined implemented with this.