Project in python capable to hide any kind of file in a audio, image and video file. Providing multiple ways to hide the message.
Hide methods
One of the methods developed to this project is called Shuffle method, it consists in shuffling the bits in a random order, generating a file (keys file) that will be necessary to retrieve the hidden message, making impossible to retrieve without it. The other is the simple method, it only saves the bytes in sequence order.
Shuffle method
Shuffle method consists in shuffling the bits of a byte in a random order before hiding the message. The order is saved in a list (called the index/keys lists) with 8 non-respective elements, the index of each element refers to the position bit to change and the value is the destination index. For example in a list where the first element (position 0) is 2, the 2nd (position 1) is 6, etc.., means that, the bit in position 0 will go to position 2, the bit in position 1 will go to position 6... Below is an example of an index list and what happens to a byte when it gets shuffled with using that list.
When using this method to retrieve the message is necessary to supply the list to get the correct data otherwise it's impossible to get it. The list has a total of 8! total combinations, equaling 40,320. But this method doesn’t use only 1 list but actually 10, raising the number of combinations to 8!10 equaling 1.1355473e+46.
It's used 10 lists only to make impossible to brute force it. It's used the last digit of the byte index to know which list to use to shuffle that byte, for example, the byte #6543 will be shuffling using the list #3 the byte #6544 using list #4 and so on.
Requirements:
To run the application these dependencies must be installed. FFMpeg is strongly recommended. Binaries are also provided, built with pyinstaller.
python3 -m pip install opencv-python numpy matplotlib scipy more-itertools
To work on audio files rather than wav, it is necessary to have FFMPEG installed on the system. The input file may be any audio format but the output must be a lossless file type (e.g. wav, flac)
Help:
py main.py -help
Hide file using shuffle mode
py main.py audio -i original_song.mp3 -o song_with_message.flac -m somezip.zip -encode shuffle
Retrieve the hidden file from the audio file
py main.py audio -i song_with_message.flac -k keys -decode
Only lossless image format can be used (e.g. PNG, TIFF), otherwise the hidden message can't be retrieved.
Hide file using shuffle mode
py main.py image -i image.png -o image_with_message.png -m somezip.zip -encode shuffle
Retrieve the hidden file from the audio file
py main.py image -i image_with_message.png -k keys -decode
Any video file may be used as the input but, the output must be avi, a container that supports raw video. FFmpeg is required to copy the audio stream from the original movie file to the carrier file.
Hide file using shuffle mode
py main.py video -i original_video.mp4 -o video_with_message.avi -m somezip.zip -encode shuffle
Retrieve the hidden file from the audio file
py main.py video -i video_with_message.avi -k keys -decode
| Arguments | Reference |
|---|---|
| audio\image\video | specifies which technique will be used (must be the first argument) |
| -i | input file, location of the original file to hide the message |
| -o | output file, location of the resulting file, may be optional |
| -m | message file, location of the file that will be hidden |
| -k | key file, location of the file containing the information to retrieve the file, may also be used when encoding a message to supply a pre-defined index lists. |
| -encode | operation to hide the message using the basic |
| -decode | operation to retrieve the hidden message |
| -help | help message |
| -info | prints some information regarding the input file |
| -generatekeys | randomly generates indexes lists and saves them in a file |
| -plot | show a spectrogram of the given audio file as input |
| -c | specifies which channel should be represent in the spectrogram |