Significance of steganography on data security

With the ever increasing amount and variety of data to be stored and transmitted in various mediums, the specification of security which has to be established at various levels of medium access and the accompanying issues of authentication and authorization has become a critical factor. Various steganographic, watermarking and data-embedding algorithms have usually manipulated the actual data in order to either hide any coveted information or to provide some level of access control over the medium. The mediums are usually images, video, audio etc., wherein specific portions or the overall space is usually 'corrupted' with 'significant' data. We attempt to bring out the significance of the steganographic techniques that are employed in information processing algorithms for data security. It deals with the problem of data security, focusing mainly on images, and tries to state the various properties and characteristics that the steganographic algorithms should possess. We also highlight the technique of masking used in the conventional steganographic LSB algorithms and in its variants.