Stegano

A cross-platform command line tool for steganography, focused on performance and simplicity.

Demo

Features

• Simple and easy-to-use command line tool
• Cross-platform support (Windows, macOS and Linux)
• Support PNG Images and WAV Audio as carrier media
• Supports strong encryption with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and Argon2id
• Hides one or many files as well as simple messages
• Based on least significant bit steganography
• Backwards compatible with stegano for windows for image en-/decoding
• Memory safe by design
• Written in rust

What is steganography?

In short, the art of hiding information in something (like a book, a image, a audio or even a video). You can find more information on my slides or checkout my talk on the rust meetup munich in june, 2020.

Install

On Linux as snap

• installation for Linux Mint
• installation for Arch Linux

TL;DR:

sudo snap install stegano

With cargo

To install the stegano cli, you just need to run

❯ cargo install --force stegano-cli

(--force just makes it update to the latest stegano-cli if it's already installed)

Note the binary is called stegano (without -cli)

to verify if the installation went thru, you can run which stegano that should output similar to

$HOME/.cargo/bin/stegano

AUR

stegano can be installed from available AUR packages using an AUR helper. For example,

❯ yay -S stegano

Usage

❯ stegano --help
Hiding data with steganography in PNG images and WAV audio files

Usage: stegano [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>

Commands:
  hide        Hides data in PNG images and WAV audio files
  unveil
  unveil-raw
  help        Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
      --x-color-step-increment <COLOR_STEP_INCREMENT>
          Experimental: image color channel step increment [default: 1]
  -h, --help
          Print help
  -V, --version
          Print version

Subcommands

hide

❯ stegano hide --help
Hides data in PNG images and WAV audio files

Usage: stegano hide [OPTIONS] --in <media file> --out <output image file>

Options:
  -p, --password <password>      Password used to encrypt the data
  -i, --in <media file>          Media file such as PNG image or WAV audio file, used readonly
  -o, --out <output image file>  Final image will be stored as file
  -d, --data <data file>         File(s) to hide in the image
  -m, --message <text message>   A text message that will be hidden
  -h, --help                     Print help
  -V, --version                  Print version

Example with am Image PNG file

Let's illustrate how to hide a file like README.md, inside an image Base.png and save it as README.png:

❯ stegano hide --data README.md --in resources/plain/carrier-iamge.png --out README.png

The final result is then contained in the image README.png.

Pro TIP you can hide multiple files at once

here I'm using the shorthand parameters (--data, -d), (--in, -i), (--out, -o)

❯ stegano hide \
  -i resources/plain/carrier-image.png \
  -d resources/secrets/Blah.txt \
     resources/secrets/Blah-2.txt \
  -o secret.png

Hidden Feature you can use a .jpg for input and save it as .png

❯ stegano hide \
  -i resources/NoSecret.jpg \
  -d resources/secrets/Blah.txt \
  -o secret.png

Example with an Audio WAV file

❯ stegano hide \
  -i resources/plain/carrier-audio.wav \
  -d resources/secrets/Blah.txt \
     resources/secrets/Blah-2.txt \
  -o secret.wav

Example Hide short messages

Now let's assume we want to hide just a little text message in secret-text.png. So we would run:

❯ stegano hide \
  -i resources/NoSecrets.jpg \
  -m 'This is a super secret message' \
  -o secret-text.png

unveil

❯ stegano unveil --help
Usage: stegano unveil [OPTIONS] --in <media source file> --out <output folder>

Options:
  -p, --password <password>     Password used to encrypt the data
  -i, --in <media source file>  Source image that contains secret data
  -o, --out <output folder>     Final data will be stored in that folder
  -h, --help                    Print help
  -V, --version                 Print version

Example unveil from an Image PNG file

Let's unveil the README.md that we've hidden (just above) in README.png

❯ stegano unveil --in README.png --out ./

❯ file README.md
README.md: UTF-8 Unicode text

Example unveil short messages

Now let's unveil the message from above secret-text.png. So we would run:

❯ stegano unveil \
  -i secret-text.png \
  -o message

❯ cat message/secret-message.txt
This is a super secret message

unveil-raw

❯ stegano unveil-raw --help
stegano-unveil-raw
Unveils raw data in PNG images

USAGE:
    stegano unveil-raw --in <image source file> --out <output file>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -i, --in <image source file>    Source image that contains secret data
    -o, --out <output file>         Raw data will be stored as binary file

Example unveil raw data

Let's unveil the raw data of the README.md that we've hidden just above in README.png

❯ stegano unveil-raw --in README.png --out README.bin

The file README.bin contains all raw binary data unfiltered decoded by the LSB decoding algorithm. That is for the curious people, and not so much interesting for regular usage.

stegano on the web

• announcement on reddit

Contribute

To contribute to stegano-rs you can either checkout existing issues labeled with good first issue or open a new issue and describe your problem.

Also every PR is welcome, just as a note of caution: at this very time the architecture and the API are still in flux and might change, so in any case I recommend opening an issue first to discuss a code contribution.

License

• GNU GPL v3 license
• Copyright 2019 - 2024 © Sven Kanoldt.