Image and audio steganography to hide textual data

Abstract

Information is often seen as a very important entity, especially in the world we live in. Information in any form often translates into knowledge and we are then able to use this knowledge to improve our lives and make processes more efficient for a better standard of living. However, a wrongful use of information can also be catastrophic in nature. Such information includes passwords, personal or confidential data, and bank account details that could lead to crimes like theft or frauds if misused. Steganography is essentially the art of concealing information. In the field of computer science and security, it refers to hiding data within other non-secret files or data. It serves a similar purpose to cryptography but instead of encrypting data, steganography simply hides it in plain sight. In this project, a desktop application was developed that utilizes either image or audio steganography to hide secret messages in text files into separate image and audio files. The technique used for both image and audio steganography is by manipulating the least significant bit present in the PNG and WAV files, respectively. The back-end logic of the project is implemented in Python while the front-end is implemented using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The Eel library in Python is used for communication between the front-end and the back-end.