debugging...

After a lot of theoretical work I am in the middle of completely rewriting pepperpickle. Currently I am half through the encryption/embedding process...

Steganography: an algorithm for threshold based embedding

I am doing a little bit of research lately because steganography has become an interesting hobby of mine.

The first "real" algorithm that will make it into pepperpickle's feature set is "Threshold-based" as discussed in the following paper by Khan, Shah, Naeem et al.:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271207740_Threshold-based_Steganography_A_Novel_Technique_for_Improved_Payload_and_SNR

It is strikingly simple to implement and, according to the authors, improves the payload and Signal-to-Noise-Ratio - let's see :)

here is how it works:

Threshold-based embedding. I found no traces of steganography in this image.

I propose the following addition, though:
If a pixel is completely white (255, 255, 255) or black (0, 0, 0), leave it as it is to make steganalysis a little bit harder.

pixelblorb v0.0.1 released!

I proudly announce the release of pixelblorb.

pixelblorb is a simple command line tool to extract an image's pixel data as text output.


Although its intended purpose is to aid in steganalysis, it can also be used to inspect color information and as a means to further process images.


The source code and README is available at github:
https://github.com/w33zl3p00tch/pixelblorb

Binary releases for Windows, Linux-amd64, Mac OS X and FreeBSD-amd64 can be downloaded here:
https://github.com/w33zl3p00tch/pixelblorb/releases


As always, feature requests, bug reports and comments are greatly welcome.

'still' life

pepperpickle v0.0.3 released!

I proudly announce the release of pepperpickle v0.0.3

Executable binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X can be downloaded here:
https://github.com/w33zl3p00tch/pepperpickle/releases


Any bug reports, feature requests and comments are greatly appreciated.

Cross Compiling Golang for Windows on Linux

Michael Tiller made a thorough write-up on cross compiling Go on Linux, which is still valid as of go 1.6.3:
Building Windows executables on Linux WITH CGo [https://groups.google.com]

I had to build like this to make it work:
$ GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build hello.go

pepperpickle - A Steganography Tool Written in Go

The famous Lena image, taken from Wikipedia. This particular image has the first published version of pepperpickle's source code hidden in it. The decryption password is upaig1Aizula2eim

Today I am suffering from a nasty cold and found some time to finish the initial version of a steganography tool I am writing.

It is written in the excellent Go programming language (golang) and the source code can be found over at github: https://github.com/w33zl3p00tch/pepperpickle


Steganography is the art of covertly hiding information in another medium.


Because simply hiding information does not secure it sufficiently, pepperpickle uses encryption to make the data less obvious.

How it works:
The message file, the so-called plaintext, is compressed and encrypted using AES256 where the encryption key is generated by scrypt and a password.
The remaining space is padded with random data to make the detection of steganography harder. We now have the ciphertext.

Then, the ciphertext is converted to a string of bits, ones and zeros. Currently pepperpickle stores the information of the ciphertext by setting the LSB (Least Significant Bit) of the color value of each pixel in the cover image.

An example for two pixels:

The first two pixels of the image have the RGB-color values
{243, 211, 102}{242, 211, 100}

The first six bits of the ciphertext are
{0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1}

The LSBs of the pixels are then flipped so that they are even or odd according to the ciphertext:
{242, 211, 102}{243, 212, 99}

When decoding, we simply look whether the color value is even or odd. If even, the ciphertext for this value is 0, if odd it is 1.


There are many different methods for hiding information and I will at least try some of them and maybe add them to pepperpickle's features.



My first name for the program was honeypickle, but after a bit of googling I decided against it ;)

http://linuxlernen.blogspot.de/

I'll probably leave this sketchbook for now and focus on something that started in August 2010.

If you are interested, here is the old and new URL of my blog:
http://endofpainting.blogspot.com


Shalom.

crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch ...

St. Stanysius - Schutzheiliger der Bankiers und Anlagenberater