ImageSteganography

While Cryptography deals with hiding the meaning of a message Steganography deals with hiding the existence of the message itself!

The advantage of steganography over cryptography alone is that the intended secret message does not attract attention to itself as an object of scrutiny. Plainly visible encrypted messages, no matter how unbreakable they are, arouse interest and may in themselves be incriminating in countries in which encryption is illegal.

This project implements Image Steganography wherein a cover Image is used where the message is embedded. More specifically, LSB Image Steganography. The project takes it a step further by encrypting the plain message first and then uses Steganography on the cipher text.

Usage

• main.py [-h] -i IMAGE [-p PLAINTEXT] [-e ENCRYPT] [-d DECRYPT]

• options:

• -h, --help show this help message and exit

• -i IMAGE, --Image IMAGE Cover Image path

• -p PLAINTEXT, --PlainText PLAINTEXT Plain text to encode

• -e ENCRYPT, --encrypt ENCRYPT Password/Key for encryption

• -d DECRYPT, --decrypt DECRYPT Password/Key for decryption

To Note:

The final image will be of PNG format, with the filename being suffixed with "enc" and the format being png

Implementation details

• The encryption/decryption of text is implemented using the Fernet class of the cryptography package.
• Fernet guarantees that a message encrypted using it cannot be manipulated or read without the key. Fernet is an implementation of symmetric (also known as “secret key”) authenticated cryptography
• All the image manipulation operations are done using the Pillow library

List of resources

• https://cryptography.io/en/latest/fernet/
• https://auth0.com/blog/image-processing-in-python-with-pillow/
• https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/Image.html
• https://www.edureka.co/blog/steganography-tutorial