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This chapter introduced two complex topics: steganography and cryptography. Steganography is widely utilized to hide data, particularly from forensic examination. As you saw in this chapter, it is easy to implement and has even been used by terrorist organizations for covert communications.
Cryptography is used to systematically scramble information such that it can be un-scrambled by use of a key. Scrambled information may be hidden, or hidden information may be scrambled, or steganography or encryption may be used by themselves.
This chapter is meant to provide a general overview of cryptography. Any truly good forensic examiner should be very familiar with the historical methods presented, and at least have a basic understanding of the modern symmetric and asymmetric cryptography algorithms, as well as of some of the fundamentals of cryptanalysis.
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