Hiding messages inside another medium is referred to as ________.

Hiding messages inside another medium is referred to as ________.

• A. steganography
• B. cryptography
• C. encoding
• D. watermarking

Answer: (A)

Hiding messages inside another medium is called steganography. The key idea is concealment—the secret information is embedded in plain sight within a carrier file (like an image, audio, or video) in a way that the overall file appears normal to casual observers. The presence of the hidden message is itself hidden, and only someone who knows the technique can extract it. This differs from cryptography, which focuses on making the content unreadable without a key but does not hide that a secret message exists—an encrypted file still signals there’s something encrypted even if its contents are protected. Encoding, on the other hand, is about representing data in a different format for transmission or storage, not about hiding the fact that a message is present. Watermarking embeds information to prove ownership or verify integrity, not to conceal a private message.

Hiding messages inside another medium is called steganography. The key idea is concealment—the secret information is embedded in plain sight within a carrier file (like an image, audio, or video) in a way that the overall file appears normal to casual observers. The presence of the hidden message is itself hidden, and only someone who knows the technique can extract it.

This differs from cryptography, which focuses on making the content unreadable without a key but does not hide that a secret message exists—an encrypted file still signals there’s something encrypted even if its contents are protected. Encoding, on the other hand, is about representing data in a different format for transmission or storage, not about hiding the fact that a message is present. Watermarking embeds information to prove ownership or verify integrity, not to conceal a private message.