Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bogobaum here. Stagonography is the art or science of not only creating a secret message, but also hiding the message itself. The word stagonography, which is based on Greek and earlier roots for concealed and writing, was itself hidden in a way for about a hundred and
fifty years. The word went into disuse in the early eighteen hundreds in favor of the word cryptography, and it only came back in the nineteen eighties as a way of distinguishing new digital types of cryptography. For the article, this episode is based on How Stuff Work. Spoke by email with Jessica Friederick, a system scientist at Binghamton University in New York and an expert on stagonography's place in digital media. She said, the power of technography is that
the very act of secret communication is not apparent. Cryptography involves taking a piece of information and then trying to render it unintelligible to anyone beside the intended recipients, which is all well and good. Digital signatures rely on cryptography, as do mobile phones and automatic teller machines. That's a t N s Yet, as computer scientist Simon R. Wiseman noted in a paper, this sort of communication quote can be seen and it is obvious that some message is
being passed, even though the message cannot be read. With stagonography, though, it's a whole new ball game, and it can work in a bunch of different ways. But one is called cover modification, in which Friderick explained quote an existing image is modified to convey a desired message. For example, with the right now, how you could embed Shakespeare quotes inside
an ordinary looking digital photo of a cat. One method of doing so would involve modifying some of the pixels in a way that's far too subtle for the naked eye to detect. A Google Chrome browser extension, unveiled in called Secret Book, capitalized on this concept. It allowed Facebook users to make incredibly slight alterations to JPEG images hosted
on the social media platform. Through that process, participants could hide messages of a hundred and forty characters are fewer right inside the pictures, unbeknownst to just about anyone who didn't have the password needed to reveal them. You might also conceal messages in digital audio files. People who use audio stagonography have many tricks at their disposal, from hiding echoes to making use of sound frequencies that lie above the normal human range of hearing. In the wrong hands,
stagonography can be a destructive tool. Cyber attackers have been known to spread harmful malware by using steganographic techniques. I think digital trojan horses. Government agencies and private companies also need to be on guard against hackers who infiltrate their websites and then leave dangerous data behind inside steganographic files. A stegan analysis is the practice of trying to detect and expose stagonography. Sometimes suspicious looking files are inspected by
algorithms designed especially for this purpose. Frederick said, modern stagonography uses powerful source coding to minimize the impact of the embedding changes. Modern stag analysis is usually based on machine learning. For those keeping score at home, machine learning is what happens when computers and algorithms are given huge sets of data to learn from and then make predictions accordingly. It's an exciting field in the world of artificial intelligence, and
stegnography has trickled into our popular culture. In The Pew Research Center reported that quote fifty percent of American teen social media users say they share inside jokes or cloak their messages in some way as a way of creating a different sort of privacy. Many teen social media users will obscure some of their updates and posts, sharing coded messages that only certain friends will understand. Scholars have called
this social steganography. Today's episode is based on the article Steganography the Art of Hiding Messages in plain sight on how stuff works dot com, written by Mark Vancini. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler. Playing or more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.