STEGANOGRAPHY TOOLS

Steganography software is the digital equivalent of invisible ink. It lets you embed data inside other files. Secret data, of course. So why use steganography—why not just ZIP your files with password protection ? Well, when you have a password-protected file of any sort, here’s something to be explained if and when someone (like your mom or boss!) notices it. (“Hmm. So you’re using passwords these days, are you? Tell me more…”) Besides, passwords aren’t completely safe. With steganography, no-one will even know there’s something hidden! Using the technique, you hide your file inside another, known as the carrier file. Hide In Picture is once such tool: you can embed files into GIF and BMP images. You retrieve your data from the carrier file just by clicking Extract in the program. You can also password-protect the carrier file if you’re so paranoid you think only you’ll survive, and then embed that into another file… Find Hide In Picture on this month’s CD or download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/hide-in-picture. A similar program is wbStego4open. This open-source, cross-platform tool allows you to embed data in BMP, text, HTML, and PDF files! Get this one from http://wbstego.wbailer.com. There are stego programs that allow you to embed data in zipped archives too. wbStego4open has two modes— Wizard and Flowchart. The latter allows users we call “advanced” to embed / extract data, passwordprotect files, and compress the carrier file, all in one window.  Steganography opens up a cool one top-corporate-boss-to-another way of exchanging secret messages via e-mail. The sender and receiver need to have the same software installed, of course.

-Asfaq Tapia