Basic Guide of Steganography and It’s Prominent Techniques

Have you ever thought about protecting your information in a simple context? Or ways to hide data? Steganography is the answer. 

Steganography is a procedure to hide information, images, audio, or video messages into another piece of the same context. 

Steganography in Cybersecurity

A cybersecurity specialist uses steganography to hide secret data within ordinary documents to avoid detection or intrusion in between source and destination. 

Steganography is a vital process in cybersecurity. It helps to protect secret information in a way that hackers are less likely to breach.

Use of Steganography

Steganography provides the freedom to hide information in several ways. The most used way to perform steganography is by hiding data or information in digital images. In this, information embeds in a digital image. Since the image in the format of JPEG, there is room for several megabytes of data. It becomes easy to attach steganographic information and pass it on to the network.

Hackers are proficient in their roles. They can use steganography to embed malicious information in the JPEG. It comes into action by changing the least significant bits in the message. When the target user access this image, it activates malware in his/her system. Hackers can control the system once this malware becomes activate.

And the worst part is the end-user can not differentiate between the two images (steganographic image or ordinary image) and end up getting affected by the malware attack.

Techniques in Steganography

There are several techniques in steganography. These techniques are:

• Secure Cover Selection

It is a complex technique or approach in steganography.  In this technique, cybercriminals or hackers compare the blocks of malicious images and ordinary images. If the image block is similar to that of the specified malware block, then the same image becomes the nominee to carry the malware.  

The final image with malware appears similar to the carrier image and also not detectable as harmful by software or application. 

• Least Significant Bit

It is a simple technique and equally impactful as prior. In this technique, cybercriminals identify the least significant bits of information in the ordinary image and alter this figure with malicious code's least significant bits. And the game is over at the user end once the user tries to access this image containing malware. 

A cybersecurity specialist can detect these kinds of vulnerable files or documents with the help of sandboxes. But again, hackers know it all, and they have a solution to detour these sandboxes. They know several techniques to get through sandboxes safely, including sleep patching.

You might be wondering about sleep patching. Sleep patching is a technique that helps the malware to get a timestamp and go to sleep and again get a timestamp and wakes upon reaching the destination. In this way, hackers counterpart the sandboxes.

• Palette Based Technique

In this steganography technique, digital images work as the carrier for malware similar to the other two. The difference comes in the procedure of sending malware via digital image source. In this, cybercriminals encrypt the message and later hide it in the expanded palette of the cover image. 

It is a little complicated and limited data carrier technique. The advantage of using it is that the cyber security specialist finds it hard to decrypt malware, consuming a requisite amount of time.

Bottom Line

Steganography is a useful but equally harmful approach in the world of cybersecurity.  In the palette-based technique, it is cumbersome for security experts to detect malware and decrypt it. Likewise, malicious images or malware carrier images are similar to digital image sources, and as a result, less likely to get detected.

It eases both cybersecurity specialists and hackers but creates a problem for a cyber security specialist or a cyber security engineer in detecting malware.