WEBVTT 00:00.420 --> 00:07.370 Steganography is the process the science of taking data and hiding it in other data. 00:07.410 --> 00:14.160 Now be careful with this because cryptography is the process of taking data and encoding it in some 00:14.160 --> 00:20.010 way so that other people can see that there is data there but they can't read it with steganography. 00:20.010 --> 00:22.350 The data itself may or may not be encoded. 00:22.410 --> 00:27.450 A lot of times it's not encoded but it's hidden in other data so that people don't even know to look 00:27.450 --> 00:30.120 there that that might be the data they're looking for. 00:30.120 --> 00:37.260 So when we talk about steganography the number one way we talk about it is that we take data and usually 00:37.290 --> 00:41.100 text and then we hide it within graphic images. 00:41.100 --> 00:45.290 So to help you see how this all works I've got this great picture of me right here. 00:45.330 --> 00:47.340 Hey thanks. 00:47.340 --> 00:50.310 Camera Guy for making such a great picture of me anyway. 00:50.430 --> 00:55.800 So what we're going to do is we're going to take this pian file and we're going to embed a little bit 00:55.800 --> 01:03.120 of text a little bit of secret text into the PMG itself so to do that well there's a lot of ways to 01:03.120 --> 01:09.060 do that but to start off we're going to go a little bit old school and by talking about old school what 01:09.060 --> 01:10.750 I mean is I'm going to open this up. 01:10.860 --> 01:16.620 In this case I'm going to use a word processing program word pad. 01:16.780 --> 01:18.600 So let's take a look at what we see here. 01:18.600 --> 01:24.270 Now this is interesting because what we're looking at is instead of looking at a P and g file through 01:24.270 --> 01:30.120 a graphics editor or through a image viewer or something like that we're just bringing out the raw text 01:30.120 --> 01:31.670 that's within that image. 01:31.680 --> 01:33.390 So there's a couple of things that are kind of handy here. 01:33.390 --> 01:39.060 For example you see the PMG up at the top almost every graphical format on earth starts off with a three 01:39.060 --> 01:43.580 letter combination of four letter combination identifying exactly what it is. 01:43.800 --> 01:49.680 Now pian Jeezy's a lot of headers and is as we scroll through here we can see there's all kinds of header 01:49.680 --> 01:55.270 information but there is a certain point where the actual data. 01:55.280 --> 01:57.660 That is the image begins to show up. 01:57.660 --> 02:00.920 So what we can do is give this a try. 02:01.170 --> 02:06.150 I can pick some arbitrary spot and now watch what I'm going to do. 02:11.240 --> 02:14.840 So you can see I type in this is secret text. 02:14.880 --> 02:16.910 Now there's a couple of downsides to this. 02:16.910 --> 02:22.330 First of all we're gambling that the image will just see this little bit of text I've written in in 02:22.330 --> 02:27.110 and try to interpret a pixel or two to be something different but things are kind of persnickety and 02:27.110 --> 02:28.950 graphics formats for example. 02:29.180 --> 02:33.680 You have a bunch of images and then you have the end of that line as it begins to draw the next line 02:33.680 --> 02:34.520 of the image. 02:34.520 --> 02:35.980 If I were to mess that up. 02:36.080 --> 02:41.380 Well we could run into trouble so there's a lot of issues involved with this that can make simply going 02:41.380 --> 02:44.330 in in a raw way like this work or not work. 02:44.330 --> 02:49.170 So I'm just I'm not going to save that but let me show you one example. 02:49.430 --> 02:55.160 Here's an example where I actually went in and I just tried to type in this is secret text and I got 02:55.160 --> 02:56.060 a result like this. 02:56.060 --> 02:57.380 This is actually a good result. 02:57.380 --> 02:59.620 It still thinks it's a P and g file. 02:59.720 --> 03:01.630 It's just having trouble interpreting it. 03:01.670 --> 03:04.880 I've seen a lot of times where you mess up and it's like I don't even know what this is and it just 03:04.880 --> 03:05.880 blows up. 03:06.140 --> 03:10.560 So keep in mind the whole idea of steganography is that to the normal person it'll just look like a 03:10.640 --> 03:11.760 PNB file. 03:11.780 --> 03:16.490 So to get around this problem what we do is there's lots of little tools out there that allow us to 03:16.490 --> 03:17.920 do steganography. 03:18.140 --> 03:21.700 So this one particular program is called Image steganography. 03:21.770 --> 03:24.300 I like this one because it's not complicated. 03:24.380 --> 03:33.560 What he can do is embed some data into BNP J pigs pian gs because the program knows these file formats 03:33.800 --> 03:37.870 and it's not going to let you accidentally put it in a place where it's going to mess stuff up. 03:37.910 --> 03:40.140 So it's actually trivially easy to use. 03:40.190 --> 03:43.810 I'm just going to drag an image over here. 03:48.550 --> 03:49.510 I can type it in. 03:49.590 --> 03:53.690 This is secret text and now it's going to say where do you want me to put this. 03:53.730 --> 03:55.320 And I'm just going to say call it Mike. 03:55.380 --> 04:05.920 Pick three and just dump it to the desktop so you'll see here we are actually encoding it. 04:05.930 --> 04:06.890 We're not encrypting it. 04:06.890 --> 04:08.910 We're just going to leave the actual text there. 04:09.230 --> 04:11.920 And these are different ways that it can embed the information. 04:11.930 --> 04:15.970 But what is important is we're going to go ahead and we make this. 04:16.040 --> 04:17.530 And here's the cool part. 04:17.540 --> 04:19.370 So we've made this new file Let's take a look at it. 04:19.370 --> 04:23.670 So just opening it up there's nothing really to see here. 04:23.950 --> 04:26.200 And that's the whole idea of steganography. 04:26.200 --> 04:29.880 You want to hide the data whether it's encrypted or not unimportant. 04:29.890 --> 04:36.340 The only downside to this is that because I use this tool to perform the steganography I need to get 04:36.340 --> 04:41.900 the other person this exact same tool because he has a proprietary way of hiding that data. 04:41.950 --> 04:44.380 So to actually get the data back out 04:47.950 --> 04:52.980 what we're going to do is we take the encoded image I can output it to a file I'm just going to say 04:52.980 --> 05:00.420 output to text and if I've done it right it's able to read the information that was put into that. 05:00.630 --> 05:03.230 So steganography is actually pretty cool. 05:03.580 --> 05:09.150 A lot of work with like the FBI and the DEA they watch out for stuff like this because it is a great 05:09.150 --> 05:10.750 way to hide stuff. 05:10.770 --> 05:12.890 It's an unsophisticated way to do it. 05:13.050 --> 05:16.140 But when you're not looking for it it can be a real challenge. 05:16.150 --> 05:17.520 Watch out for steganography 05:32.240 --> 05:33.850 in.