Hello Readers, so here I’ll be talking about Steganography and I’ll also show you how to use the technique to hide a message into a text file using SNOW. But first of all, let’s see what Steganography is. So basically, Steganography is a technique to conceal the messages into another message. So here we can hide a message into a file, an image, an audio file, or a video.
SNOW is a tool that is the abbreviation of Steganographic Nature Of Whitespace which uses ICE encryption algorithm. SNOW is a whitespace steganography tool that is used to embed hidden messages in ASCII format by extending the whitespace to the end of lines. This is done because the white spaces and tabs are not visible in text format to the viewers, thus making the messages hidden from the casual audience. The hidden messages are not available even if the built-in encryption is used to detect the message.
Installing SNOW for Steganography
For installing SNOW, you can just visit here. We can choose the platform type on which we want to run SNOW. Here I’ll be using windows as my host machine. So visiting the above link, I have downloaded the 32-bit executable. After downloading, extract the same using any compression tool (like WinRAR). Run the SNOW application. You can close that after running the same.
Options Available in SNOW
-C Compress the data if concealing, or uncompress it while extracting.
-Q Quiet mode, If not set means the application will report statistics such as compression percentage and amount of storage available.
-S Report on the approximate amount of space available for a hidden message in the text file. Line length is taken into account, but other options are ignored.
-p For setting the password for concealment of data and while extracting the data.
-l line-len When appending whitespace, snow will always produce lines shorter than this value. By default, it is set to 80.
-f Content of the file will get concealed in the input file.
-m Message String The content written in this flag will be concealed into the input file.
Example
- Open the uncompressed file.
- Run the SNOW.exe file.
- Open CMD and reach the file that you want to hide the message within.
- Write the command like below for concealing the message into a text file:
SNOW.EXE -C -p 1234 -m "hidden message" input.txt output.txtSNOW.EXE It tells the CMD window that we are using the snow tool for steganography.
-C It is for compressing the data if concealing, or uncompressing it while extracting.
-p It is for a password for concealing and extracting.
input.txt The file in which you want to conceal the message within.
output.txt The file in which you want the output.
- For extracting the hidden message, use the below command:
SNOW.EXE -C -p 1234 output.txt
For more information about SNOW, click here.
