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FEATURE
Exploring Steganography, Part 5
Retrieving Secret Text from a Picture
Issue: 21.2 (March/April 2023)
Author: Eugene Dakin
Author Bio: Eugene works as a Senior Oilfield Technical Specialist. He has university degrees in the disciplines of Engineering, Chemistry, Biology, Business, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering. He is the author of dozens of books on Xojo available on the xdevlibrary.com website.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 16,869
Starting Page Number: 43
Article Number: 21205
Resource File(s):
project21205.zip Updated: 2023-03-01 10:08:08
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Excerpt of article text...
This article is part 5 of Steganography, which is retrieving data from a picture, known as Text Steganography. A 300 x 300-pixel picture is able to hide about 90,000 characters, which works out to 20,000 words or 40 single-spaced pages. This is a significant amount of hidden information!
Another way to explain the data is that all the text in Shakespeare's Hamlet would fit in a 600 x 600 picture. An example program has been created in native Xojo code to create the final hidden picture. This article and example explicitly works with LSB (Least Significant Bit) Steganography.
This native Xojo program converts all lower-case letters to upper-case, and the conversion code should be able to run on almost any Xojo platform.
Steganography is the ability to hide text, or other data that is a secret into another picture that is not a secret. A common term is that the data is hidden-in-plain-sight. One of the many ways that Text Steganography can be used without computers is by using the first-letter of words to create a hidden message. For example, lets hide the message 'SECRET INSIDE' in a sentence, and using the color red, then the message is easier to decode.
Figure 1.
This type of steganography is decrypted by removing the first-letter from every word and then reading the message. The original message would not have the first letters colored in red.
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