With the increasing use of image as a source of information, there arises a need to efficiently process such images that results in reduced user effort as well as the storage space. This research project focuses on a way to implement version control mechanism on image data. This mechanism provides a feature where a/the user can alter any small changes in the data without modifying the original image data. A footer is formed which includes various information regarding the change made by the user in the data and that footer is appended to the original image data using compression algorithm. Similarly, the user can fetch the modified image data using decompression algorithm along with the original image data. This mechanism can be used with various base file formats such as JPG, PNG, GIF, etc. and also ensures the security of the data.

Steganography is the art and science of hiding the information in the carrier object. The main objective of steganography is to hide the existence of data. Lots of advancements has been done in the use of carrier medium, started from image, sound, video and network packets and protocols. Information hiding inside image, audio and video is often called digital steganography whereas if network packets and/or protocols are used then it is called network steganography. Using this technique we can send small amount of information confidentially. Here in this paper, various approaches towards network steganography and current status of research in this field are discussed.