Hiding in Plain Sight
Cryptography scrambles a message. Steganography hides the existence of the message. If you send an encrypted file, the NSA knows you are hiding something. If you send a picture of a cat, nobody looks twice. But that cat picture could contain the plans to the Death Star in the least significant bits of the pixel color data.
Entropy Masking
This tool simulates "visual steganography" by altering the pixel noise (entropy) of the canvas. To the naked eye, it looks like digital static. To the "Quantum Brush" (decoder), the subtle shifts in light value reveal the hidden intent.
Historical Context
- Ancient Greece: Writing a message on the wood of a wax tablet, then covering it with wax.
- Microdots: WWII spies shrinking a page of text to the size of a period (.) and gluing it to a letter.
- Modern Day: Embedding terrorist communication in eBay product image jpgs.