Indian Journal of Fundamental and Applied Life Sciences ISSN: 2231– 6345 (Online) An Open Access, Online International Journal Available at www.cibtech.org/sp.ed/jls/2014/04/jls.htm 2014 Vol. 4 (S4), pp. 646-651/Nik Research Article © Copyright 2014 | Centre for Info Bio Technology (CIBTech) 646 CRYPTOGRAPHY, ENCRYPTION/DECRYPTION AND STEGANOGRAPHY *Keyvan Derakhshan Nik Kristianstad University, Sweden *Author for Correspondence ABSTRACT Nowadays, one of the fascinating sciences is information security around the world which covers vast variety of knowledge. It includes special knowledge about data protection. Cryptography and Encryption have been used for several centuries to protect data from hackers. From past few years, in lots of efforts scientists have been allocated to encrypted information in different ways 1. One of the methods which can be used in different approaches is Steganography. In the following, this paper will give some brief Introduction of Cryptography, Encryption/Decryption and Steganography with their usage Then It will continue with some statistics for knowledge of people and their idea about this concept as a case study. This paper will end up with a summary to obtain the importance of the Steganography for future science. Keywords: Cryptography, Encryption/Decryption, Steganography, Sound File, Image File, Text File INTRODUCTION Introduction and Terminology What is Cryptography? “Cryptography is the study of information hiding and verification. It includes the protocols, algorithms and strategies to securely and consistently prevent or delay unauthorized access to sensitive information and enable verifiability of every component in a communication”. In other words, Cryptography is a knowledge that is not relay on computer science. People usually use Cryptography in daily life. For example, when people tell some slangs or idioms, they try to hide a story or a concept inside that slang or idiom; therefore, they use Cryptography in their daily conversation. Another usage of Cryptography is in the war, where soldiers usually use Cryptography to communicate with others because they do not want to give information to their enemies. What are Encryption and Decryption? To Introduce the Encryption, we require knowing some other concepts here. Scientists explain: “The original information to be hidden is called "plaintext"” 3 . On the other hand, ”The hidden information is called "ciphertext"” 3 . Now we can explain Encryption as any procedure or task to convert Plain text into Cipher text. In addition, scientists define another concept like Decryption which is explained as any task or process to convert cipher text into plain text. Encryption and Decryption usually are used in computer science to make secure connection between client and server. There are some technologies for encrypting and decrypting data but one of the most famous groups among these technologies is “Hashing technology” 4 . What is Steganography? “Steganography is the art or practice of concealing a message, image, or file within another message, image or file. The advantage of steganography over cryptography alone is that the intended secret message does not attract attention to itself as an object of scrutiny. ” 5 . In the modern technology everybody can hide information within image (.bmp , .gif,…) file , audio file and other text file without attract hacker attention to this information. On the other hand, this method is so dangerous for terrorism attack, too. But we can use it in positive ways. Scenario 1: People can have special digital image, sound or text for logging instead of using password for their email address. Therefore, sniffers cannot realize which part of data allocated to password. Moreover, this idea can expand to have both username and password in one file.