Steganography is the practice of concealing information or files within other non-secret text or data.
It is called hiding data in plain sight.
You could for example hide a text file containing secret information within an image file like this
dog file or the image file would look like a normal image but would contain the secret message the file
containing the secret data is called the carrier the modified carriers will look at the original files.
You can see here without perceivable changes.
Best carriers are videos images an audio file since everybody can send receive and download them and
they're just not a suspicious format file.
But crucially steganography is not encryption the data is just hidden not encrypted.
It would be very trivial for someone who knows what they're doing to take a copy of the original file
compare it to the other file and determine that steganography has been used and what the secret messages.
If you do use videos images Norio files to create a hidden message you can upload them to somewhere
where the file could be fundamentally altered through something like compression.
So for example uploading a video to YouTube would destroy the secret message by sending a video via
e-mail should be fine steganography is used when you need to conceal that you're sending a secret message.
Perhaps the consequences would be high if discovered when you use encryption it's obvious that you're
doing it with steganography.
It's not obvious at all that you're sending a message some steganography tools also use encryption as
well as steganography together to help make message hard to determine and one that I would recommend
for Windows is called Open Porth.
And I'll give you a demo so you can see and understand a little bit more about steganography.
And this one's got some nice little extra features which are quite good.
So if you want to download open proof then go to this Web site here download it from here.
Start the program
and see if I run it takes a little time.
Now this section is going to take you through to the help.
This is going take you to the home page of the Web site.
You can ignore this this is the watermarking some of the features It's got here.
And this is for hiding your data within a carrier and this is for hiding your data from a carrier.
So let's start by having some data to start with.
Click on hide now grow into three passwords.
And if you want to know why you need to enter three passwords then you can have a look at the manual.
Which is here which will give you a little bit more information on why it uses the three passwords as
part of an algorithm to do the steganography.
I'm going to need three passwords.
So I've done I've generates and passwords here in advance because it does need and it forces complex
passwords and copy and paste these in here and then need to add a carrier.
So I'm going to click on here and choose the dot picture as my carrier.
So there is added it is a j peg.
A hundred ninety two bites.
And now I need to add my secret message and this can be any file but there is a limitation between how
big your carrier is and how big your message is going to be.
You need a big carrier to carry a big message just like that one here kind of multiple carriers as well.
So you can have multiple videos images different files as the carriers.
So that will be fine.
I could hide that data there and it will be done.
But what I'm going to do instead I'm going to add a decoy click here.
Keeping these passwords at the decoy text is Modica text validate validated.
So in cryptography and steganography plausible deniable encryption describes encryption techniques where
the existence of an encrypted file message is deniable in the sense that an adversary cannot prove that
the plaintext data exists.
And that's what we're doing here with this decoying.
If somebody was to ask for the password if they suspected it we could give this we could give these
decoys passwords and it would reveal the decoys text instead of the real text.
So let's do the data hiding and the decoys together put those in this Steck folder.
OK here we go.
We don't.
And then we can say we've got our carrier file that is carrying our two messages it's carrying the decoying
message and it's carrying the real message.
And if you want to compare it to the original file which is here and as you see there's no real perceivable
difference between the two files.
But now you don't want to use a file from the Internet that can be used to compare with the carrier
unless you modify the carrier first by resizing it or compressing it.
Because if you just do a quick search for something on the Internet download that file because you want
to use it as a carrier.
Somebody can then just do the same thing they do a quick search try to find it use Google quite easy
to find images using google and google images and they compare it and they can see that some changes
have been made and to be able to see if it's steganography.
So what you should do is download a file resize it and compress it or use your own file.
Now if you are going to use your own file make sure there's no Matter data or EXIF data in there.
If anonymity is important to you and there's a section on access for matter data it's now on hide the
data from the carrier clothes on high end and the carrier
Kariya you've got to add the passwords and hide in the stick folder.
And then we extracted the secret message The Eagle has landed with the four passwords.
Now if somebody was trying to force us to reveal what was in here.
We could use a decoy which is here.
These passwords
carrier
and end stick for.
And that would then reveal the decoy text here that would give is plausible deniability.
They would not be able to prove that there was any of the message in there.
Another step at all is this one here where you can just simply touch on texting
and coded and coded into spam like text which you can then send an e-mail and it would look like spam.
This is just steganography.
There is no encryption in here you'd have to encrypt first if you didn't want this site for example
to know what the message was.
And then somebody could paste the text and hear the code and then they'd see you know there was the
eagle has landed.
And if you want to explore steganography more and all the tools that link it was just got absolutely
loads of steganography tools.
And if you're interested in looking at different ones and for different platforms as well so that's
steganography.