Hide data inside images

Steganography is the science of hiding information, most people use steganography to hide images or data within other images. However, files used to hide data are not limited to image files as it could be images, music files, movies, or even text files associated with ADSs streams file.

According to Wikipedia we can define this term as

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, a form of security through obscurity?

One free, easy-to-use Windows steganography tool is HideImage program, this is a free tool for hiding and even encrypting text files and hiding it inside images, a through explanation of this tool will be discussed in this tutorial.

Download ImageHide from http://www.dancemammal.com/imagehide.htm

Double click ImageHide Icon to open the tool as it does not need installation

Click on the “Load Image” button to load a new image as follow

After loading the Image, right click on the empty box below the image and select “Load Text File”, you can also enter the text you want to hide manually in the box if you want.

Now the loaded text file (the upper part of the file) appears in the box, do not worry if you cannot see the entire text file as the program shows only limited part of it

Click the “Write Data” button in the top bar to begin writing the text file to the image, the tool will write the data and the status bar of the program will show you information about data size after finishing this process

Now you should click on the “Save Image” button to save the image, you have two saving options, bmp OR png, choose one and save the image in your preferred location.

How to Open and read hidden images?

Now to open the image and view your hidden text, open the program, select “Load Image” and then click on “Read Data” as follow

The status bar shows that there is data inside the image, the hidden text will appears in the empty box, we can also right click inside the text box to save the data into another file as follow

We can further secure our hidden text through encrypting it inside the image and making it only available after entering a password , to do this do the following

1. Load an image
2. Load a text file or enter the text you want to hide manually in the text box
3. Press the “Encrypt” button in the top bar
4. The encrypt window appears showing your text file contents as follow

5. Click the “encrypt” button in the top bar , a new window appears asking you to enter a password

6. Enter a password to decrypt the text and click “OK”

7. Text is encrypted inside the window

8. Press the “close” button

9. Now, click on “Write data” , the encrypted data will be written to the image

  10.  Click on “Save Image” button to save your encrypted image

To open your encrypted image and showing your hidden text follows the following

1. Open program and click “Load Image” button to load the image that contains your encrypted text
2. Click on “Read Image” button , a new window appears contains the encrypted text
3. Click on “Decrypt” in the new window
4. A pop up window appears asking you to enter a password , enter the password and click “OK” and your text will be decrypted inside the window

5. Click “Close” to return to main program interface

6. You can save the resulting hidden file as we did in a previous step

And You are Done …