Steganography

Steganography? Stegosaurus? Stego-what? When I write about topics that match search terms, my blog posts get more hits. Wow. Sarah Palin. Tea Party. Supply Side Economics.

But seriously, I hear an NPR episode a month or so ago about Steganography. According to Wikipedia, Steganography is "is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message."

Many historical references have been made to this practice, but one ancient example is particularly cool. In order to transfer a message, Histiaeus shaved the head of one of his slaves and tattooed a message onto his head. When the slaves hair grew back, it hid the message. Can you imagine this? It seems like an very slow way to secretly transfer a message. But, if your goal is to instigate a revolt against the Persians, then you had better be careful.

These days, the most popular and common form of Steganography is digital. Messages can be hidden inside of files (image files or music files for example). When the intended person downloads this file, they can use a program to extract the message from the images.

In my mind, this is very awesome. Sadly, other individuals have started to utilize this technology to transfer messages of a much more subversive nature than I could ever imagine. To this end, Steganalysis, the art of detecting hidden messages in files, has become increasingly important.

What is the culmination of this post? Well, in my prior post, I mentioned that the pictures of my cat Max would come up again. That's right. There is a secret message hidden in those pictures! What fun!

Here is what you have to do.

1. Go to this link to download an unprocessed copy of Max.jpg

2. Download Puff

The exact link to the file that you want to download is here.

I used this open source Steganography program to hide a message in one of the pictures.

3. Extract the file and open it. Then click "unhide". Then click "add carriers" in the lower left corner of the program. Select the Max.jpg picture you downloaded earlier

4. The password, that you will have to enter twice is: password

5. Click unhide and choose a location for the output .txt file

Well? What do you think? Pretty neat, isn't it?

Let me know if it didn't work.

And I know, this is information that could be used for illegal purposes, or something like that. But I'm fairly certain that people who already know about this, well, know about it. Wikipedia doesn't have a disclaimer for the info, and nothing I have here is not already on that site. So enjoy.