Steganography is the art and science of concealing messages in other messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message. It’s a form of security through obscurity. Steganography is often used with cryptography. Plainly visible encrypted messages, no matter how unbreakable they are, arouse interest. This weakness is avoided with steganography.
Hiding messages is not new. Before the digital age, messages were hidden with invisible ink, subtle indentations in paper, messages written in Morse code that are knitted into an item of clothing, and even tattooing messages under the hair of messengers.
Ideally, the original message is not noticeably degraded by presence of a hidden message. As a result, the most effective techniques tend to make use of data that contains a lot of redundancy, such as raw audio and image files. Steganography works much less effectively, if at all, with efficient compressed formats such as JPEG.
We recommend the following steganography tools captured in a LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. All the software is free and open source goodness.
Let’s explore the steganography tools. For each program we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources.
| Steganography Tools | |
|---|---|
| OpenStego | Java based tool to hide secret data in image files |
| stegify | Tool written in Go for LSB steganography |
| Stegano | Supports hiding data in PNG images via LSB encoding |
| Snow | Whitespace steganography program |
| Steganoroute | Send steganographed text messages to mtr with fake hops in the network |
| Steghide | Uses an algorithm which is undetectable by color-frequency tests |
| Stegoshare | Java based steganography tool |
| Wavsteg | Uses least significant bit steganography to hide a file in .wavs |
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |
stegify is pretty useful