Critical Analysis of Cryptography and Steganography

Digital communication has become an essential part of infrastructure in the present world and it has witnessed a noticeable and continuous development in a lot of applications during last few decades. Nowadays, almost all applications are Internet-based and it is important that communication be made confidential and secure. Cryptography and steganography are the two important and widely used techniques that are used to provide information security over the open and insecure networks such as Internet. Cryptography distorts the original message itself whereas steganography hides the existence of the message. This paper gives an overview about the concepts of cryptography and steganography. Moreover, it presents a fair comparative analysis between various selected encryption algorithms on various parameters such as key size, block size, speed of encryption, level of security provided by algorithm, and memory usage. It also carries out comparison between traditional steganography methods and Hex Symbol Steganography method on basis of basic parameters such as capacity of carrier file to hide information, robustness and amount of security provided. The comprehensive analysis shows that AES and Hex Symbol Steganography provides more level of security and are robust in nature as compared to other competitors, hence providing more confidentiality.