Sending a secure message through the Web requires certain special care on the part of the user. Some services that promise to be private actually are not, and then there is another very important factor: not making life difficult for the recipient when trying to read that text. The proposal of QuickStego is simple: Hide messages in an image.
Steganography: hiding in plain sight
Steganography often goes unnoticed as a security resource. The normal tendency is to favor advanced encryption protocols or long passwords, but sometimes it is enough to hide the tree in the forest. The most common form of steganography on a computer is camouflaging messages with an image. The text can be an alert, a download link, or the password to decompress a file. It all depends on how creative the sending user and the recipient are. In the past we have explored some steganography tools but today we come across QuickStego, which was updated over the weekend.
Working with QuickStego
The interface is very intuitive. You load the image you want to use as a carrier, paste the text, hide it, and save the changes. QuickStego has clipboard support, and can also open files in TXT format. On the image side, the compatible opening formats are JPG (JPEG), GIF (static only) and BMP. The application has no external dependencies, and its installer does not bring any strange gifts, although the developer's plan is for the user to later upgrade to the full version, QuickCrypto.
The most important limitation I found in QuickStego, and probably the one that will keep many users away from the program, is that it only exports images with hidden messages in BMP format, and of course, any conversion attempt makes the text lost. If we take into account that the amount of text we can hide depends on the image resolution, the recommendation is to use small images as carriers, so that in their later transformation to BMP they do not become gigantic. Other than that, the program works very well, and supports Windows from XP onward.
