Nikolay Soldatov

Information Hiding

Abstract

Recently, in some of US newspapers appeared the information that using spam messages is a way of secret communications. This technique is supposed to be used by terrorist organizations and various military agencies, with help of steganographic algorithms, which are the part of a young information technology field called the information hiding. It is mainly divided into two parts: steganography and watermarking. Steganography is used not to encipher the information, but to hide the occurrence of communication in some sort of communication medium called stego-object. The secret information is called an embedded data. As an example we may consider images on the Internet, spam messages etc. The watermarking is commonly used to protect the information from changing or to provide the possibility of author's rights confirmation etc. The main difference is that cover-object plays a small role in steganography case and has a great meaning in the case of watermarking. The interest of scientific society to this field rose in 1996 when the first academic conference on this subject was organized (see presentation, p. 2).