Combination of Steganography and Cryptography: A short Survey

Abstract

Abstract The establishment of a secure communication between two communicating parties is becoming a difficult problem due to the likelihood of attacks and other unintentional changes during an active communication over an unsecured network. However, the security of secret information can be secured using either cryptography or steganography. Steganography refers to the practice of concealing a message (with no traceability) in a manner that it will make no meaning to anyone else except the intended recipient, while cryptography, on the other hand, refers to the art of converting a plaintext (message) into an unreadable format. Thus, steganography conceals the existence of a secret message while cryptography alters the message format itself. Both steganographic and cryptographic techniques are powerful and robust. In this paper, the major aim is to review several ways of combining steganographic and cryptographic techniques to achieve a hybrid system. Moreover, some of the differences between cryptographic and steganographic techniques were presented as well.