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Codes and ciphers: Steganography
1. Codes and ciphers: Steganography
2. Steganography
Steganography uses messages that are hidden in places you might not otherwise suspect messages to be.
The word "steganography" comes from the Greek word "stegos" for covered and "graphy" for written, as in a code.
Steganography often hides messages in other messages (or non-obvious places).
3. Censored letters
A story from World War II has a soldier, to avoid censors, let his girlfriend know where he was located by starting the first letter of a per-determined paragraph of each letter written so that his girlfriend could use the letters together to construct the word that let her know where he was at.
4. Microdots
Developed before World War II, microdots were used to hide messages in a dot the size of a period at the end of a sentence.
5. Images
There are steganography programs that can be used to hide/encrypt a message in an image (e.g., one bit of every pixel). Another area of research is detecting if secret messages might be hidden in an image.
6. Herodotus
Herodotus relates a case of
steganography whereby a servant's head was shaved, a message tattooed into the scalp, the hear regrown. Time was apparently not of the essence. The servant was sent to the destination where his hair was shaved to reveal the message.
This might be called a "
hair-brain" scheme.
7. Wax tablets
Another method was to write a message on a tablet. Cover it with bees wax (as was common) and then write another message on that surface. To decode, melt the bees wax off of the tablet and read the message underneath.
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