Chaos and Fractal-Based Information Hiding Techniques as Applied to Steganography

Exploiting chaos and fractals is a field of great interest and has attracted a lot of attention in the last decades as far as steganography and cryptography are concerned. Their dynamic and sensitive properties lead to numerous applications; thus, research is gradually increasing through the years. The exploration of the field and the proposed applications found in bibliography, through an effort to classify directions and techniques, is the main purpose of this work. The wide spread of networking and vast amount of data circulating everyday through internet reveal both opportunities and dangers as far as security is concerned. The opportunity arising for steganography is obvious allowing to select different channels to transmit information hidden in various multimedia files. The most frequently used files are images, as transmission is daily thriving, while efficiently provide the properties required for hiding information. The main goals in steganography are explored, that is robustness, tamper resistance, hiding capacity and perceptual transparency, presenting the role fractals and chaos theory play.