A Picture Says 1,000 Words...

...or in this case it can literally say millions!  This week we learned about a crazy technology called Steganography (say that 3 times fast).  Steganography is basically an encryption program.  It works kinda like a cypher on the movie National Treasure.  You can take text file, which is relatively small in terms of bytes, and encode the text within a picture.  The text is intertwined within the picture in such a way that you need a special program to decipher the text.  Not only that, but you also need the key code, or password, to uncover the text, so only the people you want to read it will be able to.

We were given a simple downloadable program to do our own Steganography.  The program is called "S-tools", and even for a free program it could do some pretty amazing things.  I used the program and hid within a picture of my family the compete works of William Shakespeare.  Although I'm not exactly sure why I would ever want to encode his works, it shows the power of this simple program.  With more important or sensitive material, using such a program could be very useful.

For example, lets say you created an amazing new video game for the computer.  Unfortunately,  someone stole your work and made a copy of it.  Steganography would be a way to prove that you were the original creator of the game.  By simply encoding text within the title picture for your game, you would be able decode your name and copyright to that original game.  You would have solid evidence of your originality that only you could reveal.

The only thing I do not like about the program we used, is that it was a bit tedious.  I am also not exactly sure what I would use the program for as a Facilities Manager.  Of course, every job deals with sensitive information, but to encrypt all of that information seems a bit much.  If there ever were an online transfer of critical numbers or info, such as SS numbers, account numbers, or protected plans, this could be helpful I suppose.