albinoloverats ~ Software Development

hide

hide is an steganographic image tool. It is very similar to encrypt: simple and (eventually) cross‑platform. It has, in fact, been designed and written to work alongside encrypt to provide a way to hide your encrypted data.

Your (hopefully encrypted) data is hidden in the least significant pixel values of the image of your choice, or—in the case of JPEG's—the discrete cosine transform coefficients. We prototyped with various bytes per pixel values and have come to the conclusion that storing one byte per pixel provided the best trade-off of data capacity versus image quality; 3 bits per red and blue channels, 2 bits per green.

It's worth mentioning here (as well as in the README) that hide neither compresses nor encrypts data, for that we recommend encrypt ;-) It's also worth pointing out that at the moment only four image formats are supported: JPEG PNG, TIFF, and WebP; and that the outputted image file size will likely differ from the original (it might even be smaller).

For now there is only a CLI and hide has only been compiled and tested on Arch Linux, but a GUI is currently in development and is just in need of hooking everything up. Hopefully once the GUI is working we'll be ready for the first release (which will likely be GNU/Linux only; Windows, OS X, and Android will take a little longer). The intented roadmap looks something like this:

• Available for users of GNU/Linux systems (this is where we're at now)
• GNU/Linux GUI release
• Provide a Windows binary
• Provide an OS X binary
• Start work on an Android app