Which technique hides a message by embedding it in an innocuous medium such as an image or audio file?

Which technique hides a message by embedding it in an innocuous medium such as an image or audio file?

• A. Data masking
• B. Obfuscation
• C. Steganography
• D. Tokenization

Answer: (C)

Steganography is the practice of concealing a message inside another harmless object, such as an image or an audio file. The goal is to hide the very existence of the message, not just scramble its content. For example, small changes in the least significant bits of image pixels can carry hidden data without noticeably altering the image, or data can be embedded in audio samples in a way that listeners don’t notice. This differs from cryptography, which aims to make the message unreadable without a key but does not conceal that a message is being sent at all. The other techniques operate differently: data masking replaces sensitive values in a dataset with innocuous substitutes; obfuscation makes code or data harder to understand but doesn’t hide the data inside another medium; tokenization substitutes sensitive data with tokens that reference the original data elsewhere, again not embedding information in a carrier file.

Steganography is the practice of concealing a message inside another harmless object, such as an image or an audio file. The goal is to hide the very existence of the message, not just scramble its content. For example, small changes in the least significant bits of image pixels can carry hidden data without noticeably altering the image, or data can be embedded in audio samples in a way that listeners don’t notice.

This differs from cryptography, which aims to make the message unreadable without a key but does not conceal that a message is being sent at all. The other techniques operate differently: data masking replaces sensitive values in a dataset with innocuous substitutes; obfuscation makes code or data harder to understand but doesn’t hide the data inside another medium; tokenization substitutes sensitive data with tokens that reference the original data elsewhere, again not embedding information in a carrier file.