Steganography vs. Cryptography — What's the Difference?

Steganography ( (listen) STEG-ə-NOG-rə-fee) is the practice of concealing a message within another message or a physical object. In computing/electronic contexts, a computer file, message, image, or video is concealed within another file, message, image, or video.

Cryptography, or cryptology (from Ancient Greek: κρυπτός, romanized: kryptós "hidden, secret"; and γράφειν graphein, "to write", or -λογία -logia, "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages; various aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation are central to modern cryptography.

The deliberate concealment of data within other data, as by embedding digitized text in a digitized image.

(Computers) Any of various mathematical techniques for encrypting and decrypting data in order to keep it private when transmitted or stored electronically.

The practice of hiding messages, so that the presence of the message itself is hidden, often by writing them in places where they may not be found until someone finds the secret message in whatever is being used to hide it.

The process or skill of communicating in or deciphering secret writings or ciphers.

Specifically: the use of small computer files to communicate secret information.

Secret writing.

The art of writing in cipher, or in characters which are not intelligible except to persons who have the key; cryptography.

The discipline concerned with communication security (eg, confidentiality of messages, integrity of messages, sender authentication, non-repudiation of messages, and many other related issues), regardless of the used medium such as pencil and paper or computers.

The branch of cryptography in which messages are hidden inside other messages; - used commonly for the process of hiding messages inside a computerized image file, as for example hiding the name and copyright notice of the owner of an image as protection against violation of the copyright.

The act or art of writing in code or secret characters; also, secret characters, codes or ciphers, or messages written in a secret code.

The science which studies methods for encoding messages so that they can be read only by a person who knows the secret information required for decoding, called the key; it includes cryptanalysis, the science of decoding encrypted messages without possessing the proper key, and has several other branches; see for example steganography.

The science of analyzing and deciphering codes and ciphers and cryptograms

Act of writing in code or cipher