Stegano CLI

Implementation of least significant bit steganography for PNG images and WAV audio files in rust-lang.

Aims for compatibility to the Stegano for windows version regarding image en-/decoding

What is steganography?

In short, the art of hiding information in something (like a book, a image, a audio or even a video). You can find more information on my slides or checkout my talk on the rust meetup munich in june, 2020.

Watch it in action

Install

To install the stegano cli, you just need to run

❯ cargo install --force stegano-cli

(--force just makes it update to the latest stegano-cli if it's already installed)

Note the binary is called stegano (without -cli)

to verify if the installation went thru, you can run which stegano that should output similar to

$HOME/.cargo/bin/stegano

AUR

stegano can be installed from available AUR packages using an AUR helper. For example,

yay -S stegano

Usage

❯ stegano --help                                                                                                                                                                                                       10203  00:00:39 
Stegano CLI 0.4.0-beta1
Sven Assmann <sven.assmann.it@gmail.com>
Hiding secret data with steganography in PNG images and WAV audio files

USAGE:
    stegano [SUBCOMMAND]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

SUBCOMMANDS:
    help          Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    hide          Hides data in PNG images and WAV audio files
    unveil        Unveils data from PNG images
    unveil-raw    Unveils raw data in PNG images

Subcommands

hide

❯ stegano hide --help                                                                                                                                                                                                  10204  00:00:44 
stegano-hide
Hides data in PNG images and WAV audio files

USAGE:
    stegano hide [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] --data <data file> --in <media file> --out <output image file>

FLAGS:
        --x-force-content-version-2    Experimental: enforce content version 2 encoding (for backwards compatibility)
    -h, --help                         Prints help information
    -V, --version                      Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -d, --data <data file>           File(s) to hide in the image
    -i, --in <media file>            Media file such as PNG image or WAV audio file, used readonly.
    -m, --message <text message>     A text message that will be hidden
    -o, --out <output image file>    Final image will be stored as file

Example with am Image PNG file

Let's illustrate how to hide a file like README.md, inside an image Base.png and save it as README.png:

❯ stegano hide --data README.md --in resources/plain/carrier-iamge.png --out README.png

The final result is then contained in the image README.png.

Pro TIP you can hide multiple files at once

here I'm using the shorthand parameters (--data, -d), (--in, -i), (--out, -o)

❯ stegano hide \
  -i resources/plain/carrier-image.png \
  -d resources/secrets/Blah.txt \
     resources/secrets/Blah-2.txt \
  -o secret.png

Hidden Feature you can use a .jpg for input and save it as .png

❯ stegano hide \
  -i resources/NoSecret.jpg \
  -d resources/secrets/Blah.txt \
  -o secret.png

Example with an Audio WAV file

❯ stegano hide \
  -i resources/plain/carrier-audio.wav \
  -d resources/secrets/Blah.txt \
     resources/secrets/Blah-2.txt \
  -o secret.wav

Example Hide short messages

Now let's assume we want to hide just a little text message in secret-text.png. So we would run:

❯ stegano hide \
  -i resources/NoSecrets.jpg \
  -m 'This is a super secret message' \
  -o secret-text.png

unveil

❯ stegano unveil --help                                                                                                                                                                                                10213  00:07:31 
stegano-unveil
Unveils data from PNG images

USAGE:
    stegano unveil --in <image source file> --out <output folder>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -i, --in <image source file>    Source image that contains secret data
    -o, --out <output folder>       Final data will be stored in that folder

Example unveil from an Image PNG file

Let's unveil the README.md that we've hidden (just above) in README.png

❯ stegano unveil --in README.png --out ./

❯ file README.md                                                                                                                                                                                                       10215  00:10:50 
README.md: UTF-8 Unicode text

Example unveil short messages

Now let's unveil the message from above secret-text.png. So we would run:

❯ stegano unveil \
  -i secret-text.png \
  -o message

❯ cat message/secret-message.txt
This is a super secret message

unveil-raw

❯ stegano unveil-raw --help                                                                                                                                                                                            10216  00:10:58 
stegano-unveil-raw
Unveils raw data in PNG images

USAGE:
    stegano unveil-raw --in <image source file> --out <output file>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -i, --in <image source file>    Source image that contains secret data
    -o, --out <output file>         Raw data will be stored as binary file

Example unveil raw data

Let's unveil the raw data of the README.md that we've hidden just above in README.png

❯ stegano unveil-raw --in README.png --out README.bin

The file README.bin contains all raw binary data unfiltered decoded by the LSB decoding algorithm. That is for the curious people, and not so much interesting for regular usage.

Contribute

To contribute to stegano-rs, please see open an issue on github and note that at this very time the architecture and the API is still in flux and might change.

License

• GNU GPL v3 license
• Copyright 2019 - 2020 © Sven Assmann.