How to Embed Confidential Data in a Picture using Outguess on Ubuntu

Steganography is the hiding of a secret message within an ordinary message and the extraction of it at its destination.  Steganography takes cryptography a step farther by hiding an encrypted message so that no one suspects its exists.  Ideally, anyone scanning your data will fail to know it contains encrypted data.

Check the TechTarget Link for more information.  In today's society it is imperative for individual(s) and companies to keep information secure and out of intruders hands.  Placing more obstacles in their way would deter an intruder from obtaining important information.  I will explain in this article one steganography tool in Ubuntu that can assist you in hiding personal information.

This article will show you how to embed a text file in  a picture.  Outguess relies on data specific handlers that will extract redundant bits and write them back after modification.  Currently only the PPM, PNM, and JPEG image formats are supported; per the man pages.

*Note: found that it does not work with JPEG extension so you would have to convert it to a JPG extension instead.

First you would need a image file and download it to a location.

Let us check to make sure it is not install already, in our case it is not.

Open the terminal session

Ctrl + Alt+t

Now type:

dpkg --get-selections outguess
                      

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If is not install now we are going to install the application

Type:

sudo apt-get install outguess
                      

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Now once installed I am going to navigate to the location of the image I want to convert.

Now we are going to create a text file name secret.txt, but you can name it whatever you want.

Type:

gedit secret.txt
                      

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Once the document open type a message and save the file to the same location of the image.

Now we are going to embed the secret.txt into the images.jpg file and output it to another file and you can name this file whatever you want.

Type:

outguess -d secret.txt picture.jpg picture-output.jpg
                      

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My example is as follows:

outguess -d secret.txt images.jpg gogiants.jpg
                      

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Now this screenshot shows how Outguess extract the redundant bits and write them back after modification.  According to Outguess website, "Outguess preserves statistics based on frequency counts.  As a result, statistical tests based on frequency counts are unable to detect the presence of stenographic content.  Before embedding data into an image, Outguess can determine the maximum message size that can be hidden while still being able to maintain statistics based on frequency counts." Plus look at how the size of the new image file increase.

Now I copied the image to another location to show you how to extract the data from the image file

Type:

outguess  -r picture.jpg secret.txt
                      

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My example:

outguess -r gogiants.jpg secret.txt
                      

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Now you are able to open the file and read the message. This is good if you want to hide your personal information from intruders. When you open the images side by side you could not tell the difference.

Plus you also add a secret paraphrase in order add extra security to secret.txt into the images.jpg image:

Type:

outguess -k "gmen" -d secret.txt images.jpg nygiants.jpg
                      

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To extract the hidden message from the image; plus I copied the image to another directory so it will prevent any confusion and to show the portability of the program.  If you want to save the image to a USB drive and carry it around and you happen to lose it an individual would need the paraphrase in order to extract the data from the image.

Type:

outguess -k "gmen" -r gogiants.jpg secret.txt
                      

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