Some More Cryptography Terminology

Steganography is the practice of hiding information. For instance, converting a piece of text with wax, writing text with invisible ink, or hiding a message within the pixels of an image.

As you remember from the video on slide 8, steganography isn't an optimal solution to preventing people from accessing data; strong and reliable cryptographic methods should be used instead.

Steganography is an example of Security through Obscurity, which is the (usually false) belief that a system is secure as long as its flaws are kept secret. The reason it is usually false is that attackers who are really interested in breaking into a system will, after some time, find and exploit all the previously unknown or secret vulnerabilities.

Cryptology is the practice of encrypting messages and devising new methods thereof.

Cryptanalysis is the opposite of cryptology: it is the practice of 'breaking' messages. One example of cryptanalysis that we already studied is frequency analysis.