Wanna hide that information and private things you don’t want your buddies to see? Here is what is called simple steganography. Steganography is the master of black arts. Nobody can ever suspect that there is a simple, easy-to-find drawer in one of your pictures. This works with .png files as I didn’t try it with any other. If the trick works on other file types, please let me know. All set to go? You need a GNU/Linux terminal or a Mac terminal to do this. Someone please post ways of doing this in Windows!
The Trick:
We have a file called “Secret Song.mp3”. We want to hide this into an image file. Let’s assume that our image file is called “Landscape.png”. First, compress the “Secret Song.mp3” into the .zip type compression. Then type the following in the shell:
cat Secret Song.mp3.zip >> Landscape.png
And we’re done! Whenever you want to take a peek in the drawer, simply rename the picture’s file extension to .zip. In our case, it will be “Landscape.zip”, and drag it into the Unzip window.
So what really happens…? The image viewer only reads the image part of the file as a .png format has a beginning tag and an end tag. It does not read further than the end tag, thus not running into our drawer. The same is with the decompresser.
Comments
4 responses to “Simple Steganography”
@Tomasz
“Simpler and free”, I wouldn’t say that this isn’t a very simple and definitely “free”. Well, at least to most of you out there, this is one of the “simple” and “free” methods that I would prefer!
Ok, it looks rather little bit sophisticated and complicated, there is another, much simpler and free method: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv1LpAKXIO4
Regards,
Wrote for people who are beginners in cryptography…that’s what I began with!
So you finally wrote an article on this huh. Pretty neat.