International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology Vol.60, (2013), pp.45-58 http://dx.doi.org/10.14257/ijast.2013.60.05 ISSN: 2005-4238 IJAST Copyright ⓒ 2013 SERSC Overview of Digital Steganography Methods and Its Applications V. Nagaraj 1 , Dr. V. Vijayalakshmi 2 , and Dr. G. Zayaraz 3 1 Research scholar, 2 Assistant Professor, 3 Professor, 1,2 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, 3 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 1.2.3 Pondicherry Engineering College, Puducherry-605014, India 1 nagu.n84@gmail.com Abstract Steganography is the skill of communicating secret data by embedding it into multimedia carriers like image, audio, videos. The ultimate goal here is to mask the very existence of the embedded data. Even though the term Steganography has been known for thousands of years, its digital form came about only lately and research was make stronger after the depressing event on 11 th Sep 2001(Twin towers). In contrast to Steganography, Steganalysis is the official counter attack science used for detects and or estimate the hidden information with little knowledge of Steganography algorithms. Steganography’s ultimate intentions are robustness, undetectability, and size of the hidden data. This paper provides a survey review and analysis of the different existing methods of steganography along with some common standards and guidelines drawn from the literature. This paper completes with some recommendations and advantages of Steganography techniques and current research scopes. Keywords: Steganography, Steganalysis, discrete cosines transform, least significant bit, adaptive algorithm, spatial domain, frequency domain, security, embedding payload 1. Introduction Steganography word is of Greek origin and essentially means covered writing. Greek words “stegos” meaning “cover” and “grafia” meaning “writing” so it define as covered writing. Steganography is defined by Markus Kahn as follows; Steganography is the art and science of communicating in a way which hides the existence of the communication. Steganography differs from cryptography in the sense that where cryptography focuses on secure communication, steganography focuses on secure and secret communication. In Cryptography, where the enemy is allowed to identify, intercept and modify messages without being able to violate certain security premises guaranteed by a cryptosystem, the aim of Steganography is to hide messages inside other harmless carrier in a way that does not allow any enemy to even detect that there is a second message present. In a digital world, Steganography and Cryptography are both intended to protect information from unwanted users. Both Steganography and Cryptography are excellent means by which to accomplish this but neither technology alone is perfect and both can be broken. It is for this intention that most experts would suggest using both to add multiple layers of security. The watermarking and fingerprinting are other technologies that are closely related to steganography. Steganography can be used in a large amount of data formats in the digital world of today. The most common data formats used are .txt, .doc, .bmp, .gif, .jpeg, .mp3, .avi and .wav.