Steganography tutorial

Steganography is an ancient technique of hiding secret messages in plain sight. Ranging from invisible ink, to microdots, to bits in a picture… Steganography has been widely used for thousands of years.

In this article, we will cover various types of modern-day steganography, primarily focusing on images. We will also talk about free tools available online, and how to check images against each other to verify that our message puzzles are in fact working properly before releasing them into the wild.

Steganography tools:

There’s a large variety of tools for steganography. We’re going to use two websites (listed below) to encrypt/decrypt a text message hidden in a jpeg file. But this is in no way an exhaustive nor comprehensive list. It’s simply enough to get started.

Applications (Stegosuite, stegohide, OpenPuff)
Websites(https://futureboy.us/stegano/encinput.html, https://aperisolve.fr/)

Encrypting Our Message:

So we are going to grab a jpeg image from wherever we may find it and navigate to the futureboy.us website listed above. Once we’re there, we’re greeted by a fairly simple form:

Now, click the choose file button, and drop your jpeg in. Have the “text” radio button selected, and then type a message into the textbox below that. Hit submit, and you’re good to go!

Decrypting/Checking Our Message:

Once we get that file, go ahead and navigate to the next website listed. This one is going to do some cool things, so we’re going to leave all the features enabled for now. Drag and drop your sneaky encrypted image, then hit submit.

This fella takes a sec, so be patient.

Take a look at all the fun bits of information we see. When you’re done looking, scroll down to the steghide portion. Download the file and unzip it. You should see your message in plaintext. Cool right?

And that’s pretty much all there is to that. We will go over some more advanced techniques in other articles. But now… you have managed to hide a word, phrase, or even cipher inside of an image!