Crypto-steganography of Images

This tool was developed as a part of my 7th semester projects in Digital Signal Processing.

In this project, we deal with the hiding of data in images. However, alongside simply hiding the images, we also employ cryptography so that the message cannot be easily recovered by an unauthorized third party.

Initially, I have made a python script which is meant to be run interactively. Further, support for command line arguments will be added to increase ease of use.

The project currently uses an implementation of Vignere cipher. This cipher is ideal only for text files. It becomes possible to generate an output but case and spaces are modified. Another ciphering technique will be needed to allow multiple file formats

Using the virtual environment ->

   pip install virtualenv
   virtualenv virt-env              #Creates a folder of this name which needs to be in .gitignore
   source virt-env/source/activate  #To get into the virtual environment
   deactivate                       #To quit virtual environment

Using the project on your system ->

• Install python 3
• pip install -r requirements.txt

Sample running commands:

C:\Users\super\Documents\GitHub\crypto-steganography-img>py img-steg.py -h -i pic.png -f a.txt -o steg.png -k MSW -c 1
    Hiding 23 bytes
    Runtime: 1.42 s  
C:\Users\super\Documents\GitHub\crypto-steganography-img>py img-steg.py -r -i steg.png -o b.txt -k MSW -c 1
    Looking to recover 23 bytes
    Runtime: 0.67 s

Using zip technique for steganography ->

• Install 7zip additionally on your system. On macOS and Linux it can be easily installed using
• On windows after installing the downloaded setup, make sure to include the installation location on PATH variable

brew install p7zip                # macOS
sudo apt-get install p7zip-full   # Linux

Sample Running commands:

(virt-env) C:\Users\user\PythonProjects\crypto-steganography-img>python zip-steg.py -h -i pic.png -f a.txt -o steg.png -k MSW -c 1

7-Zip [64] 16.02 : Copyright (c) 1999-2016 Igor Pavlov : 2016-05-21

Scanning the drive:
1 file, 82 bytes (1 KiB)

Creating archive: myzipfile.zip

Items to compress: 1


Files read from disk: 1
Archive size: 223 bytes (1 KiB)
Everything is Ok
Hiding 223 bytes
Runtime: 1.76 s

(virt-env) C:\Users\user\PythonProjects\crypto-steganography-img>python zip-steg.py -r -i steg.png -o steg.txt -k MSW -c 1
Looking to recover 223 bytes
Runtime: 0.61 s