Steganography - Hide important documents in images
So you probably wonder a lot of times where you should store your passwords or all those codes and pins that you only need so often... Why not hide all that in an image or images, yeah it might not be practical but honestly if someone gained access to your computer they would probably never remember to search for your passwords in an image.
By now you are probably thinking this takes a lot of time and it's hard but there are 2 easy ways you can do this 1 more secure and the other not so much
Cat - catenate (less secure)
Cat is probably one of the most used commands in linux systems, it reads data from a file and outputs it, and it is also possible to join two different types of files like an image and a text file, that is what i'm going to show you now
I'm using ubuntu but it's really up to your choice (you can even do this in a virtual machine)
First create a file
vi password
As you can see i created the file password with "thisisnotapassword" inside and cat displayed the contents of the file...
You will also need an image i just searched for free images and downloaded a random one
And now you just need to join them together with 1 simple command
cat cinco.jpeg password > cinco.jpeg
So cat grabed cinco.jpeg(image) and password(thisisnotapassword) and joined them on an image, the image will look absolutely normal however if you use cat on the image the password will be revealed making this the unsecure method
Steghide - (more secure)
So steghide probably won't come installed by default but you just have to sudo apt-get install steghide and then you can just type steghide to see the user instructions
I will be using the same text but a different image so i can show you what cat does later....
So if you read the instructions you just have to type
steghide --embed -ef password -cf lel.jpeg
"-ef" the file to embed "-cf" the cover file where the text is embedded
The passphrase adds some extra security and this is what happens if i try to cat the file now
To have your file back just type
steghide --extract -sf lel.jpeg
input your password and it's done :)
if you extracted the file you can delete it after since you can still extract it again
you can then safely delete by deleting and overwriting with random patterns there are a lot of great tools that do that
And remember don't go sending that picture or posting it anywhere since it contains your important thing/text/password in it
This is a great post. Definitely a great taste of what steganography is. There are so many ways it can be applied. There is a lot to learn about it. Anyone wanting a place to start, here is the wikipedia article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
I find it very interesting but i'm still learning so this is the most simple example of how you can use it in your daily basis :)
Very useful information , thank you @hallow for sharing this with us.I'm new here.Followed you and hope to see more quality posts from you in the future
Thank you very much!! It is good to know you found it useful, I'm also new here and i find steemit a great place to share and learn
it is indeed a great place to grow and to learn all together as a community !!!see you around .
Nice article, thanks.
For the cat method, it is not sure every graphic viewer won't complain if they find extra data at the end of the file... ;)
And for the steghide I'd also clear my history log after the operation so that nobody knows you hid something in this file. But great method maybe I'll use it.
Well with cat worked fine for me windows saw it as a normal image steghide was even better..
And i did this so you could store something that you only need so often on a windows OS or an android since not many people use linux for being afraid of the terminal xD so it would just be a matter of opening a virtualbox doing this and moving the image back to the main OS, so that is why i didn't care much for the history log (and on my kali i don't even keep logs to avoid that).
But it is good to know you liked the post, and thanks for the tips they are always welcome since there is still much i need to learn :)
Does the data survive image operations? I have heard of Steganography being used to digitally mark images so they can be tracked down on the internet.
Depends on the operation there are certain tools to examine the information that is appended to the image and remove it so it can't be tracked
Also i think compressing the image to optimize website performance like instagram does might destroy the data altough i never tried but that was a great question and i will have to try to see what happens.
Image editing probably if you use paint won't make a change some other more complex programs might....
You can always set the file as read-only as to prevent any changes being made to it. If that's the concern.
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STOPGreat post. Glad to see good people spreading the word and sharing their knowledge. Security is an important issue. This post should be earning you WAY more.