codered-steganography

CodeRED steganography project

Purpose

While watching NCIS (S5E3), I had this nifty idea to learn more about Steganography. I've been wanting to do something like it ever since, so during CodeRED: Liftoff I proposed to make something like it.

Description

Stego is a project by Austin Jackson, Matt Nyman, Arnaud Balma, and Ismael Almaguer that was made in 24 hours at CodeRED: Liftoff 2015. Steganography is a method of concealing data within other data. In our application, we use steganography with PNG images to hide text and entire files within them. We've also implemented optional, password-protected AES-256 encryption of the hidden data, to insure safety.

Prerequisites

• Requires node.js and npm to be installed

Installation and running

• Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/au5ton/codered-steganography.git
• CD into the directory: cd codered-steganography
• Install the dependencies: npm install
• Run the server: node webserver.js
• Open the website: navigate to localhost:3000 in your web browser
• You have the site running!

How to use

• Take any PNG image (We've given you some files to mess around with in the Test Files folder)

• Take any file under half the size of the PNG image

• Use the Encode section to hide your file in the PNG image (a password is optional, but you have to remember it!)

• After pressing the submit button, you will be redirected to your new PNG image which contains the file you hid in it. If it doesn't download, right-click and Save As.

• Congratulations! You've saved a file within another file, super low-key and awesome. Even better if you used a password and encrypted it.

• Now, what good is randomly encoding this data if I can't get it back?

• Navigate to the Decode section of the website. You'll have to go back to the homepage.

• In your Decode section, input only the PNG that you've encoded. Don't put the wrong one. In expected type, put the type of data you're expecting to get back from the decoding process. (If you encoded a file, select file, etc). If you encrypted your data with a password, now would be the time to input that same password. Once you submit, you'll either be greated with a bad password error, or your hidden file will be downloaded through your browser.