Steganography

Steganography is one of the words my husband tossed to me in one of our frequent blog idea discussions. Unlike him I did not immediately expose my lack of knowledge about this term by asking “Huh?” or in any way admitting that I didn’t know or had never heard of it. I guessed it was something about handwriting analysis or dinosaurs but jotted it down for further investigation either way. Although steganography has been around since the time of the ancient Greeks it isn’t as old as the dinosaurs and has nothing to do with stegosaurs, my apologies to any paleontologists reading this blog. It was not my intention to mislead. I also got to thinking that other than at school or in attaching signatures, not that much handwriting is going on these days (at least in my case). Even signatures can be digital and the majority of my pen in hand time is when I am making lists, mostly I keyboard on this computer. Handwriting analysis does include and rely heavily on a handwritten signature though but steganography isn’t that either.

Steganography defined is the science of hiding information. Secret messages are hidden in physical objects and known only to the sender and intended receiver. It is considered the dark cousin of cryptology.  Though on the surface these two terms seem similar, the purpose of cryptology is privacy and the purpose of steganography is secrecy. With computers it’s possible to create hidden messages that are even less noticeable and require software programs to reveal them. Today steganography is used in combination with cryptology to supplement encryption. An encrypted file may still hide information using steganography, so even if the encrypted file is deciphered, the hidden message can remain unseen.

In case you were wondering, there is no steganography (hidden message) in this blog post even though it would be really cool if there was. I have enough problems finding things in plain sight, like an unopened container of grated parmesan on the shelf before my eyes in my own pantry.