2.2 History and Steganography

Throughout history, a multitude of methods and variations have been used to hide information. David Kahn's The Codebreakers provides an excellent accounting of this history [Kahn67]. Bruce Norman recounts numerous tales of cryptography and steganography during times of war in Secret Warfare: The Battle of Codes and Ciphers.

One of the first documents describing steganography is from the Histories of Herodotus. In ancient Greece, text was written on wax covered tablets. In one story Demeratus wanted to notify Sparta that Xerxes intended to invade Greece. To avoid capture, he scraped the wax off of the tablets and wrote a message on the underlying wood. He then covered the tablets with wax again. The tablets appeared to be blank and unused so they passed inspection by sentries without question.