Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message itself is not disguised, but the content is obscured. (Wikipedia)
In computing terms, this generally means hiding text or files inside other files (generally an image or MP3). We have reviewed one piece of software which does this before, but I’ve decided it’s worth writing about a few more.
Hide in Picture
The piece of steganography software we’ve already reviewed is called Hide in Picture. Unfortunately, their website is no longer accessible and the only way to download it is now through SourceForge. This piece of software allows you to hide any file inside a GIF or BMP (which is a little restrictive). Also, a password is required to encode/decode.
Hide in Picture can be used through what looks like a GTK GUI or through command prompt. Unfortunately, it is for Windows and MS-DOS only.
wbStego
wbStego is software which allows you to hide files, and copyright information, inside bitmaps, PDFs, HTMlL files and text documents. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support JPG or GIF, and according to their FAQ page JPG or GIF support isn’t coming anytime soon.
wbStego is easy to operate: you can choose between a wizard and a flowchart view.
StegoMagic
StegoMagic allows you to hide any file or message inside text, Wave and Bitmap files. The restriction of the software is that the file to be hidden can be a maximum of 1/8 of the size as the file it’s to be hidden in. The software is operated through a simple GUI and it also requires passwords. (Windows only)
mp3stego
mp3stego is a piece of software which allows to hide files inside MP3s. This is unfortunately Windows only, and no GUI is provided (although one is downloadable). This software also supports passwords. Also, mp3stego is only in proof of concept stage.
Many more pieces of software are listed on this page.
Tags: security, steganography, software, windows, encryption
Kindly assist me to develop a steganography tool. I am developing one as a partial fulfilment for my MSc Software Engineering course at Jomo Kenyatta University Of Agriculture and Technology.
Thanks.
I have no programming experience. Sorry.
[...] Earlier I wrote about Steganography, also how data/messages can be hidden in image files in these posts : How to hide files in JPEG’s Steganography app hides a messages in plain sight today i find this article on lifehacker, It discusses some windows tools ( Hide in Picture ) that can be used to hide data in images. Other free Windows tools offer more filetype support. wbStego can encode and decode files in PDF’s, HTML files or bitmaps. mp3stego embeds text inside MP3 files (command line and GUI interface available.) Here are more Windows stego software options [via Webby’s World]. [...]
Hi,
I have implemented another way to hide any type of file inside mp3 file without changing its size and sound quality. My application name is mp3stegz. It’s free of charge and source code is included.
It is different from mp3stego since my application directly access mp3 file(not wav file) per byte.
If you interested, you may check at my blog:
http://achmadz.blogspot.com/2008/05/hide-any-file-inside-mp3-file.html
The minuses is: can be easily detected that an mp3 contain hidden message. However, I’ve encrypted the hidden file using RC4 algorithm.
The downloaded file is including source code in Borland Delphi 7.