Information hiding-a survey

Information-hiding techniques have recently become important in a number of application areas. Digital audio, video, and pictures are increasingly furnished with distinguishing but imperceptible marks, which may contain a hidden copyright notice or serial number or even help to prevent unauthorized copying directly. Military communications systems make increasing use of traffic security techniques which, rather than merely concealing the content of a message using encryption, seek to conceal its sender, its receiver, or its very existence. Similar techniques are used in some mobile phone systems and schemes proposed for digital elections. Criminals try to use whatever traffic security properties are provided intentionally or otherwise in the available communications systems, and police forces try to restrict their use. However, many of the techniques proposed in this young and rapidly evolving field can trace their history back to antiquity, and many of them are surprisingly easy to circumvent. In this article, we try to give an overview of the field, of what we know, what works, what does not, and what are the interesting topics for research.