Steganography Technique for Secure Transmission of Secret Message or Image

Steganography is a relatively new field of study in Information Technology which deals with information hiding. Steganography or Stego literally means “covered writing”. Steganography is the art and science of communicating in a way which hides the existence of the communication. In divergence to Cryptography, where the enemy is allowed to detect, intercept and modify messages without being able to violate certain security premises guaranteed by a cryptosystem, the goal of Steganography is to camouflage messages in a way that does not allow any enemy to even detect the presence of secret messages. Steganographic research is primarily driven by the lack of strength in the cryptographic systems and the desire to have complete secrecy in an open-systems environment. This paper deals with a brief history of Steganography, various concepts and techniques of Steganography that is used for secure transmission of secret messages or images.