stegan

Stagan is an informal shorthand sometimes used to refer to steganography, the practice of concealing messages within ordinary data to avoid detection. While not a formal term in most scholarly works, “stegan” appears in some security communities and tool documentation as a casual label for steganographic techniques and workflows.

Digital steganography hides payloads in images, audio, video, or text. Common methods modify the least significant bits of pixel values or audio samples, exploit perceptual limits, or embed data within the structure of a file format (for example in metadata or unused frames). More advanced approaches use transform domains such as frequency or wavelet representations, or employ watermarking and indexing strategies that blend payloads with signal properties.

Steganalysis, the counterpart to steganography, focuses on detecting the presence of hidden data and often recovering it. Researchers apply statistical, perceptual, and machine learning techniques to identify anomalies introduced by embedding processes and to assess the likelihood that a file contains hidden information.

Applications range from legitimate uses—digital watermarking, copyright protection, and privacy-preserving communication tools—to illicit ones such as covert channels for data exfiltration. The legality and ethics of steganographic use vary by jurisdiction and context, and many organizations employ steganalysis as part of information-security measures.

Etymology: the term steganography derives from the Greek steganos, meaning “covered,” and graphe, meaning “writing.”