How To Encrypt Text In Pictures -> Steganography

According to Wikipedia:

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.

Although the use of Steganographic tools based on image hiding is usually cumbersome relative to other encryption mechanisms, it’s still a pretty nifty little trick to have up one’s sleeve if you ever want to pass notes in class/work…

Essentially what happens is that an application will take a picture, such as your family dog’s JPEG, and then take some text you’ve written or a document, and embed it in the file itself. The image needs to be large enough to accommodate the text discreetly, otherwise the whole thing doesn’t work (you can’t have a 5MB file crammed into a 1MB picture and not raise eyebrows).

The use of steganographic tools has come under suspicion as of late though, as it is feared that it is used for nefarious purposes. However, the same could be said of any cryptographic or security tools on the market. I think security tools are no different than any form of self-defense or weapon. In the wrong hands, horrible things can be done, in the right hands, data can be protected or verified. There have been many efforts to control the outflow of encryption technologies out of the USA, but in the end, it’s through the thorough testing of technologies that you can truly arrive at a mature product. The more eyeballs looking at code, and/or the more brains working on a problem, the better the end result should be.

So.. if you want to give it a shot, I’ve included the links to two free tools for the Mac below:

Pict Encrypt from Pariahware

and

iSteg from Hanynet.com

Ok…

I won’t be mean… if you are not a Mac user, you can also use TrueCrypt which is pretty good too.

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