This week’s reading gives you basic technical information about passwords and encryption, and how to recover data protected by these mechanisms. There is also a section on Steganography, which literal

This week’s reading gives you basic technical information about passwords and encryption, and how to recover data protected by these mechanisms. There is also a section on Steganography, which literally translated means “covered writing.” When some people think of steganography, or “stego,” they think of documents or other data files being hidden in other file types (usually image/picture files). This is something that is used frequently in secreting child pornography to avert detection. Interestingly, the use of stego goes much farther back than the use of computers.
Like cryptology, steganography is used to hide something in something else. So, even though a code breaker can detect the hidden code, they may not be aware that the code actually contains a different message. Cryptography scrambles a message so that it is unreadable, but still visible, while stego camouflages data to hide it or make it undetectable. This course is not meant to teach you about the technical details of encryption or passwords or steganography (entire books are written on each of those subjects), but rather to help you understand their place in the criminal justice process.