Steganography

Steganography is the practice of hiding a message within a message, which is a form of cryptography. A common practice is coding text within a photo. In the digital age it became easy to do this with video, music, or even text files. You can use software to encode your secret message into the binary of the file, then use the same software to decode it.

A website that can encode and decode messages in images is:

https://stylesuxx.github.io/steganography/

In 1499 Johannes Trithimeus wrote three volumes that appeared to be books about magic. They were published more than a hundred years later, along with a decryption key that revealed the books were in fact about steganography and cryptography. This was the first know example of steganography in the real world.

So the next image you see posted to your Facebook timeline could hold a hidden message! Imagine a modern day spy, hiding their reports back to the home country coded in the binary of an advertisement on the homepage of the Washington Post.

As Obi-Wan Kenobi once wisely instructed a young Luke Skywalker, “Your eyes can deceive you, don’t trust them.”