What is Data Hiding?

What is Data Hiding?

1.  Data Hiding is a very ancient art.
2.  Caesar cipher.
3.  Egyptians used symbolic language in their pyramids.
4.  Coded Language.
5.  Writing with invisible ink.
6.  With the dawn of the Digital World, now just the
7. Methods have changed, but the aim is still the same.

What is Data Hiding ? Cont.
In Modern Times, Data Hiding is associated with digital forms such as cryptography, steganography, and watermarking.

1. Cryptography is obscuring the content of the message, but not the communication of the message.
2. Steganography, which is greek for “covered writing”, is hiding the very communication of the message.
3. Watermarking attempts to add sufficient metadata to a message to establish ownership, provenance, source, etc

But, it is much more than that.
Reasons Behind Hiding Data

1. Personal, Private Data.
2. Sensitive Data.
3. Confidential Data, Trade Secrets.
4. To avoid Misuse of Data.
5.  Unintentional damage to data, human error, accidental deletion.
6. Monetary, Blackmail Purposes.
7.  Hide Traces of a crime.
8. For Fun.

Overview

1.  Basic Logical Techniques used to hide Data in Microsoft Windows XP.
2. Thinking out of the box, using applications for things other than their intended use.
3. Data hiding using internal concept of Microsoft Windows XP.
4. A dive into the File System of Microsoft Windows XP,i.e. NTFS.

Logical Techniques

1. The Usual right click and hide; the hidden attribute.
2.  Assign the file a system attributes.
3.  Rename it as a system file and paste it in the windows directory.
4. Most often used by Malware
5. Svchost.exe
6. Change of extension.
7.  Change of Icon.
8.  Rename as “null”.