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By Syed Owais Ahmed Zaidi, Tamoor Ali Khan, Syed Sajjad Hussain, Manzoor Hashmani
Keywords: Steganalysis, steganography, security, cryptography, information and communication technology.
In the past decade significant growth has been observed in security and assurance of information. Initially, cryptography was considered as the only appropriate approach for information security over the media. This is because at that time not very significant development occurred in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). But nowadays a tremendous growth of ICT is being observed and reported in literature. This opens a new era of steganography and steganalysis for information security and assurance. Steganography is the process of hiding data in an image. It significantly reduces the risk of information being stolen or sniffed. Steganalysis is the capability of detecting and retrieving the hidden messages in multimedia document. Researchers have proposed different methods of steganography and steganalysis. These techniques have been reported with certain performance parameters and issues. The researcher initiating research in this area gets caught in the labyrinth of issues and their solution before coming up with his/her own solution and thus loses significant time and effort. In order to provide a roadmap to researchers starting research in this area, we have in this paper presented a comprehensive survey of steganography and steganalysis methods with their performance measures and reported issues.