Study of Various Methods for Securing Data Communication

In this modern era, with a lot of internet based applications various organizations, companies, govt. agencies, etc. communicate digitally. A lot of multimedia data are generated and transmitted which are easier to edit, modify and duplicate. So sharing this data is a critical issue due to security problems. Hence some techniques are needed to protect the shared data. Cryptography is a technique by which the original data can be converted to some other format by the help of a key which without the knowledge of key cannot be read by an outsider. We can make this communication more secure by using the concept of Steganography along with Cryptography. Steganography is hiding the sensitive information in some media e.g. hiding a text file in an image file, etc. to transfer the information securely over the communication network. This paper presents various encryption and steganography techniques that are in practice today