Steganography Analysis and Research Center
The word Steganography is derived from the Greek words steganos which means cover and graphy which means writing. Thus, steganography literally means “covered writing.” Covered writing has been used throughout
history for secret communications.
Criminals, to include terrorists, have always sought ways to conceal
their activity in real, or physical space. The same is true in virtual,
or cyber space.
Digital steganography represents a
particularly significant threat today because of the large number of
digital steganography applications freely available on the Internet
that can be used to hide any digital file inside of another digital
file.
Use of these applications, which are both
easy to obtain and simple to use, allows criminals to conceal their
activities in cyber space.
Thus, steganography presents a significant
challenge to law enforcement as well as the intelligence community
because detecting hidden information and then extracting that
information is very difficult and may be impossible in some cases.
By providing a national repository of
steganography application hash values, or fingerprints, and developing
tools, techniques, and procedures to find and extract hidden
information, the SARC is rapidly evolving into a high-value law
enforcement, homeland security, and national security asset in the
global war on terrorism and effort to combat cyber crime.