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Steganography in your art.

How to hide files in your art

Hey, did you know that you can hide data and other types of information in your images? Yes it is possible to conceal and embed digital information including text, other images, and even entire files inside your own artwork! How? I'll tell you!

It is possible to hide data inside other data (usually images) using a process called steganography. Steganography unlike cryptography is the art of hiding or concealing information rather then encrypting it. Bacon's Cipher is an olde steganographic technique used to hide encrypted messages inside regular messages. This old cipher invented by Sir. Francis Bacon (alleged to be an anonymous ghostwriter for William Shakespeare by some conspiracy theorists) is still used even today to hide messages written by the Aryan Brotherhood (That is a very notorious prison gang that practically owns most US Prisons).

A lot of people and technologies use steganography for various reasons. A few examples include:

The Audio Watermarking system known as Cinava uses steganography to conceal digital watermarks in the audio tracks of DRM'd Blu-Ray Discs. These hidden data streams can be detected by the players but not the human ear. Unlike most steganographic techniques, this one can withstand encoding conversions and compression and decompression without data corruption.
Many photographers use an image steganography technology called DigiMark to hide authorship information in their photos. This hidden text can even be detected even on printed media.
Even people on this site use steganography to conceal digital watermarks, text, and other secret information inside their art for whatever reason.

Steganography often employs cryptography to further protect and conceal the hidden data.

Now there are many different pieces of steganography software out there on the internet. Some free, others not. Some are better then others. A good example is the 4chan Gold File Embedder written in java. This one is not very good as you can often see the hidden data as "noise" in the image. The one that I would recommend for you to use is StegoShare.

Download Link: stegoshare.sourceforge.net/

This is another steganography program that is free and open source and written in java. This program can be run on linux, windows, and OS-X. This one is much better at hiding data inside images in a way so that it is impossible to detect any hidden information with the human eye and offers the option to encrypt the hidden data to make it even harder to find. Just make sure you remember the password you used to encrypt the data with, otherwise you are SOL.

Basically you choose the file you wish to hide and then select the image or images you want to use as the cover images. Then hit the button and it will hide the file inside the images and output them as .PNG images. You can choose to keep the original file names or let it use the default file names for the output. THIS WILL NOT WORK WITH ANIMATED .GIF IMAGES!

NOTES:

The image or images you chose as the cover images that will hide the data must be the same size or larger then the file itself. So do not try to hide a large 1.5 GB video file unless you have a 1.5 GB image or 1.5 GB worth of images. The program will tell you if the cover image size is too small to fit the data. Also the output images will be much larger in size then the originals as well so make sure you have space to store them.

DO NOT ALTER THE OUTPUT IMAGES IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER! THIS INCLUDES THE ADDITION OF WATERMARKS AND CHANGING THE IMAGE FORMAT OR SIZE! DOING SO WILL CORRUPT THE HIDDEN DATA AND MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO EXTRACT IT! This does not include the file name. You can change that to whatever you want as long as you keep the extension a .PNG

If you want to share the hidden data on deviantART you must enable downloading of the image or at least enable the full size viewing of it at the original resolution or else you will not be able to extract the data. Because it is a .PNG image, it will still work when you or another user tries to extract the secret data. This may open the image up for infringement by other people but it is the ONLY way to preserve the concealed data and ensure that it can be accessed in the future. Not to mention that if your intention is to share concealed data then infringement should not even be an issue.

It is best to use highly detailed images with lots of colors and such and not too many mono colored spaces. DO NOT USE A BLANK MONO COLORED IMAGE! JPEG, PNG, BMP formatted images are preferred. It might support other formats but I have not tried that yet.
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