unforum

[Ofiuco]

Steganography tools

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Camouflage is probably the most popular in the ARG community.
There are any number of other programs that have been "cracked" to a certain extent.

For Camouflage, there is a tool called "Camouflage Password Finder" that removes any challenge, at all, from the exercise of decrypting a Camo-stegged image.

Most means of stegging an image can be hacked with varying amounts of work, but the possibilities are limitless. We could all have our own personal steganography standard by simply tweaking a byte in the source code of a single tool like Camouflage.

In general, I'm not a fan of stegging due to all this variability. Unless you tell your players, "Hey, this was stegged at http://mozaiq.org/encrypt/ and the password is on Sarah's (Isn't there a Sarah in every game) blog." they may never happen on the tool you decided to use and lose interest, altogether.

One of the fairest methods is to play with the least significant bit of every n pixels in a well-known image. That allows folks to easily compare the stegged image to the untouched one and see where and what the differences are.

[Ofiuco]

Will Camouflage decrypt text only, or will it also do files other than text? Say I want to steg a picture in a picture, etc.

[thebruce]

I believe Camouflage does any file, as it inserts the binary info into an unused segment of the destination file... could be wrong on that though.

But yeah, for steganography, it's better to stick to standard methodologies (like the LSB modification) than proprietary methods that require a specific app, unless maybe you could somehow build it into the story...

But there are so many ways to encode or embed data into various file formats, it's a great way to send hidden messages. I think it's because of the almost limitless steganographic methods that it's hard to find a general one-stop-shop for de-stegging files.

Ideally, puzzles that incorporates steganography should also provide some hint as to what form of stegging is used (whether a specific app or a method).

In a perfect world, an app that can de-steg anything would probably need to be some level of AI with a sort of 'instinct' as to how or where data could be encoded (knowing oodles of file type specs and documented steg processes, so if none match, it could try to 'guess' at a potential process)

[Ofiuco]

True. I was reading some news articles where they essentially described a nightmarish dystopia of undetectable steganographic methods. And they had no clue where to begin to counteract that. Whatever happened to the good old days of Camera/Shy?! :D