Steganography for e-commerce: possibilities and applications

The rapid growth in e-commerce applications via the Internet in the past decades is the reason that both small office and corporations need to protect their data. These transactions’ data include sensitive documents transfer, digital signatures authentication and digital data storage.

Although there exist numerous encryption techniques, contemporary machines are able to break them, so the whole process is confident only in a very small scale or not confident at all. Stronger encryptions are usually forbidden by the law exposing a great danger of their improper usage by criminals. Moreover one can suspect that something is hidden, because most of the encryption techniques uses some hashing or bitwise operations, which makes the output totally unreadable by human in any form.

Digital steganography is a technique of hiding information in a way, which is publicly available, but this fact is still not known publicly. Thus, steganography uses the digital media as a camouflage and a secret content through cyberspace is created by modern computers utilizing signal-processing techniques.

The opposite for steganography is steganalysis, which deals with finding hidden information in media. The most important element in steganalysis is to determine if in testing media is any covered data.

It will be shown that steganography can have wide usage in e-commerce applications for hiding information in digital media in the way which prevent discover its existiance. The usage of steganography for information security in various e-commerce applications through the Internet will be discussed in this article. These applications include digital signatures authentication and validation of electronic documents, digital data storage as well as secure
communication of multimedia data through open channels.