Steganography tool in JAVA: Hide your message in image files

History behind Steganography

It is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. It was first used in 440 BC.

The motive behind this project was to merge a text file to an image file, so that the message can be sent in a hidden way. Although this will increase the size of the image file but it will not decrease its quality or distort it in any manner.

Steganography achieves its goal if the message text is inserted in such a way that the file size does not increase, when the message occupies the empty spaces in between the image file.

Prerequisites to run this file:

1. Java 1.6 or higher must be installed on machine.
2. System variable "Path" should be set to the path of Java bin directory. (C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_02\bin)

Steps to hide message:

1. Download file from the link below and run the steganography_tool.jar file.
    Open Command prompt and type "java -jar steganography_tool.jar" to run it.
2. Click on "Image file" button and browse it to Open any image (jpg,bmp,png)
3. Click on "Text file" button and browse it to Open any txt file whcih has some text you want to hide in the specified image.
4. Click on "Hide it!!" button to hide the text in the selected image
5. A new file is generated in the same folder of image with prefix "_new" appended to the image filename.
6. Now open the new generated file with notepad and scroll it till the end to see the hidden text.

Eager to know the code of this tool, get it from my git repo.

git clone https://github.com/saurabh221089/steganography_tool.git