Provided by: stegsnow_20130616-5_amd64 bug

NAME

       stegsnow - whitespace steganography program

SYNOPSIS

       stegsnow  [  -CQS  ] [ -h | --help ] [ -V | --version ] [ -p passwd ] [ -l line-len ] [ -f
       file | -m message ] [ infile [ outfile ]]

DESCRIPTION

       stegsnow is a program for concealing messages in text files by appending tabs  and  spaces
       on  the  end  of lines, and for extracting messages from files containing hidden messages.
       Tabs and spaces are invisible to most text viewers, hence  the  steganographic  nature  of
       this encoding scheme.

       The  data  is  concealed  in  the  text  file  by  appending  sequences of up to 7 spaces,
       interspersed with tabs. This usually allows 3 bits  to  be  stored  every  8  columns.  An
       alternative  encoding  scheme,  using  alternating spaces and tabs to represent zeroes and
       ones, was rejected because, although it used fewer bytes, it required more columns per bit
       (4.5 vs 2.67).

       The  start  of  the  data  is  indicated  by  an  appended tab character, which allows the
       insertion of mail and news headers without corrupting the data.

       stegsnow provides rudimentary compression, using  Huffman  tables  optimised  for  English
       text.  However,  if  the  data  is  not text, or if there is a lot of data, the use of the
       built-in compression is not recommended, since an external  compression  program  such  as
       compress or gzip will do a much better job.

       Encryption  is  also provided, using the ICE encryption algorithm in 1-bit cipher-feedback
       (CFB) mode. Because of ICE's arbitrary key size,  passwords  of  any  length  up  to  1170
       characters  are  supported  (since  only  7  bits  of  each character are used, keys up to
       1024-bytes are supported).

       If a message string or message file are  specified  on  the  command-line,  stegsnow  will
       attempt  to  conceal  the  message  in  the  file  infile  if specified, or standard input
       otherwise. The resulting file will be written to outfile if specified, or standard  output
       if not.

       If  no  message  string is provided, stegsnow attempts to extract a message from the input
       file. The result is written to the output file or standard output.

OPTIONS

       -C     Compress the data if concealing, or uncompress it if extracting.

       -f message-file
              The contents of this file will be concealed in the input text file.

       -l line-len
              When appending whitespace, stegsnow will always produce  lines  shorter  than  this
              value. By default it is set to 80.

       -m message-string
              The  contents  of this string will be concealed in the input text file.  Note that,
              unless a newline is somehow included in the string, a newline will not  be  printed
              when the message is extracted.

       -p password
              If  this  is set, the data will be encrypted with this password during concealment,
              or decrypted during extraction.

       -Q     Quiet mode. If  not  set,  the  program  reports  statistics  such  as  compression
              percentages and amount of available storage space used.

       -S     Report  on the approximate amount of space available for hidden message in the text
              file. Line length is taken into account, but other options are ignored.

       -V, --version
              Display usage information and exit.

       -h, --help
              Display usage information and exit.

EXAMPLES

       The following command will conceal the message "I am  lying"  in  the  file  infile,  with
       compression,  and  encrypted  with  the password "hello world". The resulting text will be
       stored in outfile.

              stegsnow -C -m "I am lying" -p "hello world" infile outfile

       To extract the message, the command would be

              stegsnow -C -p "hello world" outfile

       Note that the resulting message will not be terminated by a newline.

       To prevent line wrap if text with concealed whitespace is likely to be indented by mail or
       news readers, a line length of 72 or less can be used.

              stegsnow -C -l 72 -m "I am lying" infile outfile

       The approximate storage capacity of a file can be determined with the -S option.

              stegsnow -S -l 72 infile

AUTHOR

       This application was written by Matthew Kwan, who can be reached at mkwan@darkside.com.au

SEE ALSO

       ice_key_create(3)