A steganography-based social network that hides secret communication within innocent images, turning social media into a covert privacy tool.
🚀 Built as a team project for Devfest 5.0 Goa
Experience the hidden world:
🔗 Visit SHADOWNET
SHADOWNET is a privacy-first social media platform that enables hidden communication using steganography, where messages are invisibly embedded inside images instead of being stored as text.
To the public, the platform appears as a normal social feed of photos, memes, and videos. Behind the scenes, encrypted messages are concealed within pixel data and can only be revealed by users who possess the correct secret key.
SHADOWNET eliminates traditional chat databases entirely — images themselves act as the data layer. This design supports secure, censorship-resistant, and deniable communication for journalists, activists, privacy-conscious users, and creative communities.
Built during DevFest 5.0, Goa, SHADOWNET challenges conventional ideas of social networking by combining security, creativity, and usability into a single stealth-based communication system.
🔐 Authentication — Secure user sign-in and logout using Firebase Authentication.
📰 Public Feed — A normal-looking social feed of images, memes, and videos with likes, comments, and sharing.
👥 Friends & Connections — Search users, send connection requests, manage friends, and chat privately.
🧪 Encode Media — Hide encrypted messages inside images or videos using steganography with secret-key protection.
🎭 Decoy Content — Optional fake messages to mislead unauthorized viewers and enhance plausible deniability.
⏳ Self-Destruct Posts — Automatically delete posts after a specified number of views or time duration.
🔍 Decode Messages — Extract hidden messages by uploading media and providing the correct secret key.
🖼️ Media-as-Database — No text chat storage; images themselves act as the message carrier and data layer.
👤 User Profile Management — Edit profile details, display picture, bio, and manage personal posts.
🔐 Privacy-First Design — Server never reads hidden content; all encoding and decoding happens client-side.
⚡ Real-Time Interactions — Live updates for posts, likes, comments, and chats using Firebase services.
SHADOWNET follows a client-heavy, privacy-first architecture where sensitive operations like encryption and decryption happen on the user’s device, and the backend acts only as a secure data carrier.
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Frontend → React + TypeScript (UI, state management, social interactions)
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Steganography Engine → Client-side image encoding & decoding using JavaScript utilities
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Backend Services → Firebase Firestore & Firebase Storage (posts, metadata, media)
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Authentication → Firebase Authentication (secure sign-in / sign-out)
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Real-Time Features → Firestore listeners for feed, likes, comments, and chat
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Privacy Layer → No text-message database; images act as the data layer
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Hosting → Firebase Hosting (production deployment)
In SHADOWNET, the server never knows the hidden message. Images appear normal in public feeds, while only users with the correct secret key can extract encrypted data — making communication deniable, censorship-resistant, and stealth-based.
Frontend
- React + TypeScript
- Vite
- Client-side steganography (image & video encoding / decoding)
Backend / Services
- Firebase Authentication
- Firebase Firestore (real-time feed, likes, comments, chat)
- Firebase Storage (media hosting)
- Firebase Hosting
Security / Processing
- JavaScript-based steganography utilities
- Client-side encryption & decryption
- Optional auto-expiry logic (time / view based)
- No visible conversation trail
- Messages hidden in plain sight
- Encrypted chats without raising suspicion
📌 Freedom of press & secure sourcing
- Works in regions where messaging apps are blocked
- Avoids keyword-based surveillance
📌 Images and memes bypass intent detection
- No chat logs stored forever
- Server never knows message content
📌 Privacy by design, not policy
- Wi-Fi passwords
- Exam room info
- Temporary internal notes
📌 Message disappears with the image
- Poems hidden in artwork
- Easter eggs in posts
- Secret communities
📌 Art + cryptography crossover
- Sign up / Login
- Secure session handling
- Logout support
- Two filters:
- Connected Users
- All Posts
- Like, comment, and share posts
- Looks like a normal social feed
- Search users
- Send / accept connections
- One-to-one chat system
Step-by-step flow:
- Select image or video
- Add caption & public content
- Optional hidden message (key-protected)
- Optional fake message (decoy)
- Auto-delete after:
- X views or
- X minutes
- Upload image
- Enter secret key
- Extract and view hidden message
- Edit profile (DP, bio, etc.)
- View own posts
- Manage active content
- No plaintext messages stored
- Encrypted data hidden inside media
- Key-based decoding
- Optional self-destruct logic
- Minimal server knowledge
- Images are treated as data vaults.
- Steganography in real-world applications
- Client-side encryption principles
- Designing privacy-first systems
- Secure social feed architecture
- Firebase service layering
- Hackathon-scale product thinking
- Balancing UX with security
This project was built as a group submission for Devfest 5.0 by:
Subham Kolay
Asmita Chakraborty
Soumyadeep Saha
Trishit Majumdar
Hooghly Engineering And Technology College
BTech Computer Science.
- End-to-end encrypted group drops
- Watermark-resistant encoding
- Mobile app version
- Anonymous publishing mode
- Decentralized storage integration
If you find SHADOWNET interesting or impactful, consider giving this repository a ⭐ — it motivates our team to keep building!
