stegsnow(1)

NAME

   stegsnow - whitespace steganography program

SYNOPSIS

   stegsnow [ -CQS ] [ -h | --help ] [ -V | --version ] [ -p passwd ] [ -l
   line-len ] [ -f file | -m message ] [ infile [ outfile ]]

DESCRIPTION

   stegsnow is  a  program  for  concealing  messages  in  text  files  by
   appending  tabs  and  spaces  on  the  end of lines, and for extracting
   messages from files containing hidden messages.  Tabs  and  spaces  are
   invisible to most text viewers, hence the steganographic nature of this
   encoding scheme.

   The data is concealed in the text file by appending sequences of up  to
   7  spaces,  interspersed  with  tabs.  This usually allows 3 bits to be
   stored  every  8  columns.  An  alternative  encoding   scheme,   using
   alternating  spaces and tabs to represent zeroes and ones, was rejected
   because, although it used fewer bytes, it required more columns per bit
   (4.5 vs 2.67).

   The  start of the data is indicated by an appended tab character, which
   allows the insertion of mail and news headers  without  corrupting  the
   data.

   stegsnow   provides   rudimentary  compression,  using  Huffman  tables
   optimised for English text. However, if the data is  not  text,  or  if
   there  is  a  lot  of  data, the use of the built-in compression is not
   recommended, since an external compression program such as compress  or
   gzip will do a much better job.

   Encryption  is  also  provided,  using  the ICE encryption algorithm in
   1-bit cipher-feedback (CFB) mode. Because of ICE's arbitrary key  size,
   passwords of any length up to 1170 characters are supported (since only
   7  bits  of  each  character  are  used,  keys  up  to  1024-bytes  are
   supported).

   If  a message string or message file are specified on the command-line,
   stegsnow will attempt to conceal the message  in  the  file  infile  if
   specified,  or  standard  input  otherwise.  The resulting file will be
   written to outfile if specified, or standard output if not.

   If no message string  is  provided,  stegsnow  attempts  to  extract  a
   message  from  the input file. The result is written to the output file
   or standard output.

OPTIONS

   -C     Compress the data if concealing, or uncompress it if extracting.

   -f message-file
          The contents of this file will be concealed in  the  input  text
          file.

   -l line-len
          When  appending  whitespace,  stegsnow will always produce lines
          shorter than this value. By default it is set to 80.

   -m message-string
          The contents of this string will be concealed in the input  text
          file.   Note  that,  unless a newline is somehow included in the
          string, a newline will  not  be  printed  when  the  message  is
          extracted.

   -p password
          If  this  is  set, the data will be encrypted with this password
          during concealment, or decrypted during extraction.

   -Q     Quiet mode. If not set, the program reports statistics  such  as
          compression  percentages  and  amount of available storage space
          used.

   -S     Report on the approximate amount of space available  for  hidden
          message in the text file. Line length is taken into account, but
          other options are ignored.

   -V, --version
          Display usage information and exit.

   -h, --help
          Display usage information and exit.

EXAMPLES

   The following command will conceal the message "I am lying" in the file
   infile,  with  compression,  and  encrypted  with  the  password "hello
   world". The resulting text will be stored in outfile.

          stegsnow -C -m "I am lying" -p "hello world" infile outfile

   To extract the message, the command would be

          stegsnow -C -p "hello world" outfile

   Note that the resulting message will not be terminated by a newline.

   To prevent line wrap if text with concealed whitespace is likely to  be
   indented  by  mail  or news readers, a line length of 72 or less can be
   used.

          stegsnow -C -l 72 -m "I am lying" infile outfile

   The approximate storage capacity of a file can be determined  with  the
   -S option.

          stegsnow -S -l 72 infile

AUTHOR

   This  application  was  written  by Matthew Kwan, who can be reached at
   [email protected]

SEE ALSO

   ice_key_create(3)

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