While talking to my friend stan I was quite surprised to see his non-tech ways of hiding p0rn from his girlfriend in his windows box. Which he thinks is a genius method. What he basically does is make a bunch of folders with different, confusing, not-so-interesting names and hide his stash deep deep inside the subfolders. Something like this (not his actual computer):

While I have to give him props for his noble ways, I think we can do a better job in hiding his “important” files in linux. We are going to use a tool called steghide, which uses Steganography, to hide some “important” pictures. While some might argue that there are better ways to hide things in linux and other might argue that it’s not really a practical way to hide 100s (even 1000s?) of pictures. Though I used “p0rn” as a medium, this is more of tutorial about hiding files in general using Steganography. And perhaps more important to my friend stan and other windows users, is that Steghide is also available for windows.

Basically we will have to jpg file and hide/embed one file into another. It is important to note that the file size of file that you will embed to has to be bigger than the embedding file. The file type itself is not important.

In the screen shot below you can see that the file size increased after the embedding/compression. We used this command: steghide embed -cf notporn.jpg -ef thisisporn.jpg

Next we will get some information about the embedded data by using this command
steghide –info notporn.jpg

The next step is of course to extract the embedded/encrypted/compressed data out to open for viewing pleasure. This can achieved by using this command steghide –extract -sf notporn.jpg

For more information about steghide check out: http://steghide.sourceforge.net/
For information about Steganography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography