Steganography

The practice of hiding secret information within ordinary, non-secret data or a physical object.

Cryptography
Makes data unreadable

Transforms the message into ciphertext that cannot be understood without the key.

Example:

"HELLO""KHOOR"

Message is visible but meaningless
Steganography
Hides data existence

Conceals the message within innocent-looking carrier data without raising suspicion.

Example:

"Nice photo!" (contains hidden data)

Message existence is invisible
Text Steganography Demonstration
See how secret messages can be hidden within ordinary text using invisible characters

The carrier text that will contain the hidden message

Will be encoded as binary and hidden using zero-width characters

A
01000001
ASCII: 65
T
01010100
ASCII: 84
T
01010100
ASCII: 84
A
01000001
ASCII: 65
C
01000011
ASCII: 67
K
01001011
ASCII: 75
Embedding...
The‌​‌‌‌‌‌​‌​‌​‌​‌‌‌​‌​‌​‌‌‌​‌‌‌‌‌​‌​‌‌‌‌​​‌​‌‌​‌​​ quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This is a normal looking sentence that anyone can read.

The text above looks identical to the cover text, but contains 48 hidden bits of data using zero-width Unicode characters.

Common Steganography Methods

Image Steganography

Hides data in the least significant bits (LSB) of image pixels. Changes are imperceptible to the human eye.

LSB modification visualization

Text Steganography

Uses invisible characters, whitespace manipulation, or format changes to embed hidden data in text.

Hello​​​World

Zero-width characters between words

Audio Steganography

Embeds data in audio files using techniques like LSB encoding, phase coding, or echo hiding.

Waveform modification