Inspiration
We were both really interested in image steganography and it's wide array of applications. It can be used for simple social media posts or games, but it can also be used by people who have to hide information. For example, journalists or protestors that are subject to surveillance and searches could use image steganography to hide valuable information. While encryption makes communication secure, adversaries still might know that information is being communicated. Steganography can help keep communication completely secret, which can allow you to avoid being tracked by an adversary in the first place.
What it does
The user can upload an image that they want to encode with a secret message or they can upload an image that is already encoded to retrieve the secret message.
How we built it
We used python to write the code for the steganography tools and we built the web app using the django framework, which uses python, html, and sqlite.
Challenges we ran into
Two big features we wanted to implement but were unable to due to time were the ability to embed an image within an image (we were able to write code for this but did not have the time to integrate it within our web app) and having friend groups. The idea of groups is that you can choose which people can access the key that is used to encode your images, so only those people can decode your images. Similarly, you can only decode someone's images only if you are in their group.
Steganography involves places bits of data in between pixels of the image, which can be very difficult for high quality images, so it took us a while to figure out how to implement this.
Also, we wanted to make our web app more user friendly and have better design, but we had to prioritize other tasks.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to get a functional product. Anyone can easily encode/decode an image using our tool. Despite not knowing a lot about steganography and having little experience with building web apps, we were able to make a lot of progress.
What we learned
We learned a lot about steganography and the challenges within the field, and how it could be used. Also we gained a lot of experience with building web apps and how to make a product for users.
What's next for Image Stegosaurus
It would be really cool to complete the big features we talked about and turn the web app into a fully functional, good-looking piece of software that could eventually be deployed.
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