Introduction
1.1 Background of the study
In this digital world of information transmission, information is the heart of computers, transmission and global economy transaction. In ensuring the security of data and information (confidentiality integrity, accuracy and authenticity) as characteristics of information, the concept of data and information hiding have attracted people to come up with creative solutions to protecting sensitive information from being intercepted or falling into wrong hands. The problem of protecting this sensitive information from unintended users is becoming complex.
In a modern society, and Nigeria in particular, the protection of sensitive information involves many, interdependent policies and technological issues relating to information confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, anonymity, utility (Gideon Gbaden Amah 2015).
Many users would prefer to use the Internet as their primary medium of transmission with the advancement in technologies since the introduction of cashless economy in Nigeria where the Internet is the main medium of transaction across the Nigerian state.
Data security means the protection of data from unauthorized user (hackers, attackers or adversaries) and providing high security so as to prevent modification and interception of sensitive information (Gideon Gbaden Amah 2015) in transmission. The security of sensitive information has attracted more attention in recent times due to massive increase in transfer, research and transaction over the Internet.
In improving security of information transmission and transaction over the Internet, so many techniques for hiding sensitive information are increasing day by day with more sophisticated approaches. The digital media used for this secret (hidden) transmission and transaction include text, images, audio, video, and protocol which provides excellent carriers for hidden information. Due to the growth of information transmission and transaction, the security of sensitive information has become a major concern (S. A Laskar, etal 1990). The deployed techniques for improvement of security of information include, watermarking, fingerprinting, cryptography, and steganography etc. Watermarking and fingerprinting are closely related technologies to steganography (Kavith Kadam 2013), which are primary concerned with the protection of intellectual property right.
Watermarking marks all the instance of an object in the same way. Signature is the kind of information hidden in water making to signify that the originality or ownership for the purpose of copyright property. Fingerprinting embeds different unique mask (Kavith Kadam 2012) in distinct copies of the carrier object that are supplied to different customers. With this, the intellectual owner identifies the customer that break or violates their licensing agreement by supplying the property to third parties. Cryptography is a techniques used in securing the secrecy of transmitted information. It is not often enough to keep the contents of a message secret. Various methods have been developed in encrypting and decrypting data in order to keep the information secret. It may also be necessary to keep the existence of information secret. Steganography is a technique used in keeping the existence of an information secret.
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