| Library - of technical articles along with code samples supported by Andrew Polar |
| Steganography |
Why steganography is not a security threat for United States
By definition steganography is hiding a secret message within a larger one in such a
way that others can not discern the presence or contents of the hidden message. We
know unconfirmed speculations that criminals and terrorist organizations are using
steganographic images published on-line for secret communications. It is definitely
possible to hide one image inside another and also possible to publish this image.
It is not possible, however, to find an excuse why the image of, say, used
car for sale is published in lossless format such as PNG or GIF. Photographic
picture in PNG format published on-line may draw an attention of security
specialists and when this attention is drawn the image is no longer steganographic,
because by definition the fact of communication must be hidden.
Below you can see two images of my cat and one of them contains picture of myself,
compressed and distributed within low order bits.
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I publish the full source of the program that does hiding and extraction. Original
image is not encrypted, only compressed. This program is a simple toy or programming
exercise. The presence of hidden image can be detected by distribution of low order bits.
I would not advise both bad guys and good guys to use this program for anything other
than testing the concept.