OpenStego

Stenography, in case you’re not familiar with this security through obscurity concept, is the science of writing hidden messages so that no one but the sender and recipient can even suspect such a message exists. With the progress of computers and software, it is now easier than ever to do this. And the simple truth of the matter is that by using OpenStego it is incredibly easy to hide a secret message within an image, or a smaller image within a larger one.

Seeing that it’s less than 1MB in size, it’s safe to say that getting the OpenStego installer will take little time, even if you’re on a lousy internet connection. Run the aforementioned installer and you will be presented with a very simple setup wizard. Agree to the license, select the installation directory, and hit Install – moments later the installation process will be complete.

There are two tabs on the application’s interface: Embed and Extract.
Embed is for adding hidden messages to a cover file. You can hide a piece of text or an image into the cover. The cover can be a BMP, GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, or WBMP file.
Extract is for pulling out hidden messages from files.

Let’s say you want to hide a text into a JPG image. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on what you have to do:
Step 1 – from the Embed tab, the Message File section, select the TXT file with the text you want to embed.
Step 2 – from the Cover File section, select the JPG image you want to use.
Step 3 – from Output Stego File select where to save the embedded image.
Step 4 – this one is optional; choose to encrypt the data.

Using OpenStego to extract hidden messages is a very simple matter. Just select the file that contains the secret, then select where you want that secret to be saved, and then let OpenStego do its job.

As it is released under a GNU General Public License, OpenStego is a free application.

Hide text and images into other images – and very easily extract what is hidden That’s what you can expect to get from OpenStego, a free and very easy to use stenography solution.