Steganography is the process the science of taking data and hiding it in other data.
Now be careful with this because cryptography is the process of taking data and encoding it in some
way so that other people can see that there is data there but they can't read it with steganography.
The data itself may or may not be encoded.
A lot of times it's not encoded but it's hidden in other data so that people don't even know to look
there that that might be the data they're looking for.
So when we talk about steganography the number one way we talk about it is that we take data and usually
text and then we hide it within graphic images.
So to help you see how this all works I've got this great picture of me right here.
Hey thanks.
Camera Guy for making such a great picture of me anyway.
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
of text a little bit of secret text into the PMG itself so to do that well there's a lot of ways to
do that but to start off we're going to go a little bit old school and by talking about old school what
I mean is I'm going to open this up.
In this case I'm going to use a word processing program word pad.
So let's take a look at what we see here.
Now this is interesting because what we're looking at is instead of looking at a P and g file through
a graphics editor or through a image viewer or something like that we're just bringing out the raw text
that's within that image.
So there's a couple of things that are kind of handy here.
For example you see the PMG up at the top almost every graphical format on earth starts off with a three
letter combination of four letter combination identifying exactly what it is.
Now pian Jeezy's a lot of headers and is as we scroll through here we can see there's all kinds of header
information but there is a certain point where the actual data.
That is the image begins to show up.
So what we can do is give this a try.
I can pick some arbitrary spot and now watch what I'm going to do.
So you can see I type in this is secret text.
Now there's a couple of downsides to this.
First of all we're gambling that the image will just see this little bit of text I've written in in
and try to interpret a pixel or two to be something different but things are kind of persnickety and
graphics formats for example.
You have a bunch of images and then you have the end of that line as it begins to draw the next line
of the image.
If I were to mess that up.
Well we could run into trouble so there's a lot of issues involved with this that can make simply going
in in a raw way like this work or not work.
So I'm just I'm not going to save that but let me show you one example.
Here's an example where I actually went in and I just tried to type in this is secret text and I got
a result like this.
This is actually a good result.
It still thinks it's a P and g file.
It's just having trouble interpreting it.
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
blows up.
So keep in mind the whole idea of steganography is that to the normal person it'll just look like a
PNB file.
So to get around this problem what we do is there's lots of little tools out there that allow us to
do steganography.
So this one particular program is called Image steganography.
I like this one because it's not complicated.
What he can do is embed some data into BNP J pigs pian gs because the program knows these file formats
and it's not going to let you accidentally put it in a place where it's going to mess stuff up.
So it's actually trivially easy to use.
I'm just going to drag an image over here.
I can type it in.
This is secret text and now it's going to say where do you want me to put this.
And I'm just going to say call it Mike.
Pick three and just dump it to the desktop so you'll see here we are actually encoding it.
We're not encrypting it.
We're just going to leave the actual text there.
And these are different ways that it can embed the information.
But what is important is we're going to go ahead and we make this.
And here's the cool part.
So we've made this new file Let's take a look at it.
So just opening it up there's nothing really to see here.
And that's the whole idea of steganography.
You want to hide the data whether it's encrypted or not unimportant.
The only downside to this is that because I use this tool to perform the steganography I need to get
the other person this exact same tool because he has a proprietary way of hiding that data.
So to actually get the data back out
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
output to text and if I've done it right it's able to read the information that was put into that.
So steganography is actually pretty cool.
A lot of work with like the FBI and the DEA they watch out for stuff like this because it is a great
way to hide stuff.
It's an unsophisticated way to do it.
But when you're not looking for it it can be a real challenge.
Watch out for steganography
in.