Steganography and Arachniography

Steganography refers to hiding encrypted data or information inside of a common or completely innocent looking file such as an image, audio, or video file.

For all intents and purposes, most people will never be aware that the file is more than it appears to be, thus providing a nice hiding place in plain sight.

If someone does become aware of the ‘extra data’ in a file, it can be identified as encrypted data or information, but will be undecipherable without the decryption key.

An Arachniography is the web-based equivalent of a bibliography. Taking things one step further, an annotated Arachniography is the web-based version of an annotated bibliography.

Andrew J. Butrica of NASA was the person responsible for coining the term during his work on the history of NASA’s X-33 project.