Stepic

Forensics: Image Steganography

This is another part of image steganography, even with my little exprience, i have always wondered how come there is no image steganography for PNG’s. To be more precise, image steganography mostly “involves hidding of information in JPEG’s”, and also most tools work only on jpg’s such as steghide -extract -sf image.jpg, literally the steghide command has a preference, or is configured to work only on jpg’s.

Deep dive

Turns out after years of my cybersecurity journey, i finally found about image steganography for PNG’s. Now, there is this, specific tool that actually allows for that implemention, and that is stepic. Stepic, is a tool used for steganography.

The stepic tool, uses a different approach to steghide. Stepic hides data inside an image, by slightly modifying the colours of the pixels. These modification are generaaly imperceptible to humans, but are machine detectable. For the highlight, Stepic does not work for JPEG images.

Usage

• There is a module avalaible, in python3 for stepic. Meaning you can use it in python:

    import stepic
  
    # Encode data into an image
    encoded_image = stepic.encode(image_path, data)
  
    # Decode data from an image
    decoded_data = stepic.decode(encoded_image_path)
  

• Or my preference, use it on the command line:
  • To decode the image(png):

      stepic -d -i image.png
    

  • -d: decode
  • -i: file
  • but, for simplicity, you can always just type the name stepic, and hit that enter!
    

Installation

• To install stepic is easy:

    pip install stepic