Critique of A Review Article

Every day throughout history they have found technology changes as fast as you can buy the latest hardware or software.  Information security is actually quite younger than computers, as it was not needed immediately after their creation.  As the technology continues to rapidly evolve and develop so quickly, it is becoming difficult to keep up with the required internet security changes.  Originally, cryptography was used on a regular basis for encryption between users when messaging one another.  Although cryptography has now become inadequate over time.  This security vulnerability within cryptography of requiring a secret key allows a hacker the ability to decipher it easily.  Once the risks were found in cryptography due to the rapid growth in technology and the average humans understanding, steganography was developed in its place.  When utilizing steganography for communication it would embed the message within a cover medium, such as an image.

As the author discusses the techniques of image steganography, there is an introduction, comparison, background, reason, history, classification, benefits, drawbacks, just to name a few.  Throughout this article Chugh achieves displaying the resources to the readers, through the many strengths and weaknesses that will be dissected and explained.  Dissected information may include material, such as the data and sources provided, grammar, structure, authors argument, ideas, and support; as this article will be examined, evaluated, and reviewed entirely.  As image steganography studies and techniques are reviewed by Chugh, to provide a full review and explanation of the image steganography techniques available today.  When reading the article, it is obvious that he clearly utilized multiple sources such as studies, surveys, and journals.  Luckily, he was able to quote these resources well throughout his own article to strengthen the ideas of image steganography.

Providing the readers with background information on steganography such as the history of the word, originating from Greek meaning “covered or protected”, and rapid growth history.  As Chugh argues his point regarding history, “Due to the prohibition and restriction imposed by the government on cryptographic systems, steganographic technologies are a very important part of the future […]. (Chugh, 2013)”, this makes internet security growth very difficult to keep up with..  Chugh then recommends the argument towards the interest in image steganography when, “Publishing and broadcasting industries have become interested in techniques for hiding encrypted […]” (Chugh, 2013).  Steganography in general has actually been around a lot longer than you would have imagined dating back to 1499, as information hiding was extremely messy but useful for many reasons.  Chugh mentions many known historical figures who used some sort of information hiding (steganography) to send hidden message to another person.  Although, in the technological world today, there are many more ways to utilize steganography than there were in the 1800’s.  There are a total of four steganography categories, text, images, audio/video, and protocol; Chugh lists these out as a numerical list it allows the reader to see these clearly.  A small section mentions the process of steganalysis which is cracking the steganographic process, also known as hacking.

 As we move further along, Cugh’s strengthens his argument by discussing image steganography in further detail.  There are many diagrams to assist the readers understanding with the information given.  Image Steganography can be utilized by hiding information such as data in text, images, audio files, and in protocols.  The concept well known in the technical world of “What You See Is What You Get” applies in Image Steganography as well.  There are only two steps in the steganography system and it is completed.

Image steganography can be checked for effectiveness by comparing the stego image with the cover image.  To determine the effectiveness, the following are some factors that can be checked, robustness, imperceptibility, payload capacity, PSNR, MSE, SNR, NCC, and BER.  As shown in Cugh’s article in Figure 4, the two most popular schemes used for image steganography are spatial domain and transform domain.  Cugh continues to strengthen his article by providing more information on image steganography and different techniques.  Such as the Least Significant Bit Method, Masking and Filtering, Parity Checker Method, Gray Level Modification, Pixel value Differencing technique, Algorithms and Transformations, and each has their own advantages and drawbacks provided.  Similar there are benefits and drawbacks of steganography also, it would be beneficial to utilize cryptography with steganography.

Cugh provides readers with a current list of applications that utilize image steganography to give them an idea as to what we could do if it was progressed any further in the future.  Image steganography only hides the message, it does not actually encrypt the message, we would need to utilize cryptography with steganography to gain that ability.  Copyright Protection, which is used to ensure everyone knows that the steganography “item” is owned.  Feature Tagging, is similar to tagging on Facebook except it would be embedded, so it would contain the user or name of person and possibly their location.  Digital Watermarking is the ability to embed a digital watermark inside of an image in order for someone to verify the full authenticity.  The worst application yet, use by terrorists, steganography is and can be used at an extremely large scale by terrorist to hide messages secretly to spread terrorism across the country. (Chugh, 2013)

References

Chugh, G. (2013). Image Steganography Techniques: A Review Article. Acta Technica Corviniensis - Bulletin Of Engineering, 6(3), 97-104.