Live Project - 6.  Steganography - Technique to hide information within image file

Type : Desktop/Client Server, Technology : C#; Credit : Mr. Atanu Maity

Abstract
Steganography is the art of hiding the fact that communication is taking place, by hiding information in other information. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency on the internet. For hiding secret information in images, there exists a large variety of steganography techniques some are more complex than others and all of them have respective strong and weak points. Different applications may require absolute invisibility of the secret information, while others require a large secret message to be hidden. This project report intends to give an overview of image steganography, its uses and techniques. It also attempts to identify the requirements of a good steganography algorithm and briefly reflects on which steganographic techniques are more suitable for which applications..

Steganography is the practice of hiding private or sensitive information within something that appears to be nothing out to the usual. Steganography is often confused with cryptology because the two are similar in the way that they both are used to protect important information. The difference between two is that steganography involves hiding information so it appears that no information is hidden at all. If a person or persons views the object that the information is hidden inside of he or she will have no idea that there is any hidden information, therefore the person will not attempt to decrypt the information.

What steganography essentially does is exploit human perception, human senses are not trained to look for files that have information inside of them, although this software is available that can do what is called Steganography. The most common use of steganography is to hide a file inside another file..

Project Scope:
This project is developed for hiding information in any image file. The scope of the project is implementation of steganography tools for hiding information includes any type of information file and image files and the path where the user wants to save Image and extruded file.

Methodology:
User needs to run the application. The user has two tab options – encrypt and decrypt. If user select encrypt, application give the screen to select image file, information file and option to save the image file. If user select decrypt, application gives the screen to select only image file and ask path where user want to save the secrete file.
This project has two methods – Encrypt and Decrypt.
In encryption the secrete information is hiding in with any type of image file.
Decryption is getting the secrete information from image file.

Graphical Representation
The graphical representation of Steganography system is as follows:

System Analysis & Design

Steganography system requires any type of image file and the information or message that is to be hidden. It has two modules encrypt and decrypt. Microsoft .Net framework prepares a huge amount of tool and options for programmers that they simples programming. One of .Net tools for pictures and images is auto-converting most types of pictures to BMP format. I used this tool in this software called “Steganography” that is written in C#.Net language and you can use this software to hide your information in any type of pictures without any converting its format to BMP (software converts inside it).

The algorithm used for Encryption and Decryption in this application provides using several layers lieu of using only LSB layer of image. Writing data starts from last layer (8st or LSB layer); because significant of this layer is least and every upper layer has doubled significant from its down layer. So every step we go to upper layer image quality decreases and image retouching transpires.

The encrypt module is used to hide information into the image; no one can see that information or file. This module requires any type of image and message and gives the only one image file in destination.

The decrypt module is used to get the hidden information in an image file. It take the image file as an output, and give two file at destination folder, one is the same image file and another is the message file that is hidden it that.

Software used

• Front End : C# - .Net Framework 3.5
  Features of C#

  • C# is a simple, modern, object oriented language

  • C# includes native support for the COM/OLE and windows based applications

  • Partial types

  • Aliases

  • Static classes

  • Property access modifiers

  • Nullable types and the null coalescing operator

  Namespace and Base Classes used in this project are

  • System.Drawing

  • System.IO

  • System.Deployment

  • System.Xml

  • System.Data
     

Download the project documentation, source code and project files.

For any query and help regarding this project visit.
http://www.programmer2programmer.net/forums/forum_main.aspx?forum_id=6

Click here to view the online demo of the application.