Imagine you have a message that you want to keep secret. It’s a way to hide your message without anyone knowing it’s there. The area of steganography allows you to do so! Steganography is the practice of representing information within another message or physical object so that the presence of the message is invisible to the human eye. Today’s class taught usd about this concept and even hid a message. It had me thinking about how many potential hidden messages there are out there on the web.
The way steganography works is fascinating. The first step is to convert the text message into binary format. This is done by encoding each character in the message into its corresponding binary representation. Depending on the chosen encoding scheme, the message will be encoded into either 0s or 1s,. After each message is encoded into binary, the characters will come together to form the entirity of the message. After the message is encoded into binary, you will want to make sure the message is broken down into small chunks to fit into the least significant bit of individual pixel values. Next, you are going to want to find an image in which you want to hide your message.
After you find your image, modify the LSB of each pixel’s color channels to embed the binary message. For instance, if the LSB of a pixel’s red channel needs to be changed to match the binary message, it is set to 1 if the corresponding bit in the message is 1 and 0 if it’s 0. Repeat this process for all pixels until the entire message is embedded. And there you have it, your message is hidden! Now you can be like me and start hiding messages everywhere for your friends to find! You might ask yourself, how do my friends extract the hidden message? Well, they will have to iterate each pixel of the modified image. Then, retrieve the LSB of each color channel and concatenate them to reconstruct the binary message. Finally, have them convert the binary message back into text format.
Thankfully, we do not have to do all that ourselves, and we have computers with advanced technology that enable us with this capability. We can use steganographic encoders such as the one we used in class to encode messages into images easily. All you have to do is enter a text message into the area provided along with an image, and boom! Steganography! There may be a message hidden in here….
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hsc.com%2Fresources%2Fblog%2Fsteganography-in-tokenization%2F&psig=AOvVaw0pP7B9ZLj49EZw-wvJ4wzV&ust=1712011076701000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBQQjhxqFwoTCPCDpbLIn4UDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAT
ChatGPT: 30-40%
Prompts:
“Explain how steganography can be used to hide text in an image by modifying the least significant bit.”
“Make this more human”