Steganography is the art of hiding data within data, so no one can see or hear (in case of hidden messages in audio files) the secret message, except that persons who use the right piece of software to extract the hidden information. Today’s media files such as bitmap images or audio or video clips are great carrier files because of their size, and their binary format which is not human-readable.
For detailed information, please see: [Journal of J / Vol. 2 No. 2 Oct 2013] (http://www.journalofj.com/index.php/vol-2-no-2-october-2013)
Steganography is "Security by Obscurity" in some ways which is a weak concept for storing secrets. But there are ways to make steganography a more secure approach:
-
Keep your original bitmap image on your own computer, and never ever upload it to a cloud service, send it by email, or make it available on the internet in any way. Without the original bitmap image, it’s much more difficult for code breakers, to find the hidden text in the modified image, because there is no original image to compare with.
-
Pre-encrypt your secret text, before embedding it. It’s much more difficult to detect a hidden message, when it’s not directly machine-readable. 100% - security is an illusion! But you can make it more difficult for code breakers to find and read your secret texts.
By the way, using Steganography is a great way to send messages without the explitict definition of the recipient (no communication meta-data). Just upload the bitmap image to a photo site/cloud. Anybody can view/download the image, but only people with the right piece of software and/or decryption key can read the hidden message.
This small staganography tool is fully implemented in the J programming language. To run the application, please download the J software suitable for your platform.