Image Steganography

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Image Steganography means hiding text behind an image so that no one other than the intended person gets the message that one wants to send.

Steganography v/s Cryptography?

In cryptography it is pretty vivid that the sender is sending some message but in such format that can’t be read unless it is decrypted, while in Steganography, intruder won’t even know that there is some message been sent in addition to the image, so in no way he will try to read the hidden message. Eventually intruder won’t even realize that there is some .


Steganography Tools

There are many tools readily available on net, which can be used to hide text behind image. Following are few of them:
  1. QuickStego
  2. GifShuffle
  3. Image-steg

One drawback with these tools is that the tool which is used to hide message on the sender side, the same tool is needed on the receiver’s end to reveal the hidden message. To overcome this we can use window’s command prompt to perform Steganography.
Steps to Hide Text:
  1. Type in the text you want to hide into a txt file; keep this text file in a folder along with an image.
  2. Open command prompt.
  3. Switch to the directory in which you have put image and text files (use ‘CD’ command)
  4. Use following command:  

copy /b IMAGE_NAME + TXT_NAME.TXT  TARGET_FILE_NAME
Replace IMAGE_NAME with the name of image, along with extension and TXT_NAME with text file name.
Example:
copy /b myimage.jpg+ my text.txt myimage1.jpg
The result should look like this:-

On receivers end:-

On receivers end to see the hidden text you can simple open the text file using notepad, you will see a lot of crappy text in it, just scroll down to the end to the file, there you will find the hidden text like this