Hiding Messages in the Noise of a Picture

Abstract

The hide a message, open a bitmap file, then enter a password or select a key file. The key file can be any file, another bitmap for example. This password or key will be treated as a stream of bytes specifying the space between two changed pixels. I don’t recommend text files, because they may result in a quite regular noise pattern. The longer your key files or password is, the less regular the noise will appear.

Next step, enter the secret message or choose a file, and click the Hide button. The application writes the length of the message in bytes into the first pixel. After that it reads a byte from the message, reads another byte from the key, and calculates the coordinates of the pixel to use for the message-byte. It increments or resets the color component index, to switch between the R, G and B component. Then it replaces the R, G or B component of the pixel (according to the color component index) with the message-byte, and repeats the procedure with the next byte of the message. At last, the new bitmap is displayed. Save the bitmap by clicking the Save button. If the grayscale flag is set, all components of the color are changed. Grayscale noise is less visible in most images.

To extract a hidden message from a bitmap, open the bitmap file and specify the password or key you used when hiding the message. Then choose a file to store the extracted message in (or leave the field blank, if you only want to view hidden Unicode text), and click the Extract button. The application steps through the pattern specified by the key and extracts the bytes from the pixels. At last, it stores the extracted stream in the file and tries to display the message. Don’t bother about the character chaos, if your message is not a Unicode text. The data in the file will be all right. This works with every kind of data, you can even hide a small bitmap inside a larger bitmap. If you are really paranoid, you can encrypt your files with PGP or GnuPG before hiding them in bitmaps.  Hiding Messages in the Noise of a Picture

REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS

The completion of this thesis requires the following Software & Hardware

Software Requirements

Hardware Requirements

PROCESSOR – Pentium IV

RAM – 32 MB

SECONDARY STORAGE – 1 MB

MOUSE – Logitech

SOFTWARE DESCRIPTION
Microsoft.NET Framework

Microsoft made the specifications for .net development platform freely available for the compiler vendors in the form of common language specification (CLS). The common language specifications provide the specifications for a language to compile into a common platform. The compiler vendors must design the compiler in such a way that the compiled code conforms these specifications. These compilers compile the programs written in the high level language into a format called intermediate language format.

 

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