Concealar

Security forced individuals to come up with various techniques to add protection to nearly everything, especially software components and files. Some got developed from existing methods used in ancient times, such as hiding text in pictures. This is also what Concealar helps you with, to send secure messages through images.

It doesn’t take a great deal of time or effort to get the application installed on your computer. However, in order for the setup process and the program to run, you need to be sure that your computer is fitted with .NET Framework, even though it comes in the default set of features in modern Windows iterations.

The visual design isn’t anything to make it stand out from the crowd, but there is a sort of personal touch to it, with different background pictures, colored text strings, and a couple of tabs. Encryption is done in one section, while the second tab helps you extract the text from existing encrypted pictures.

The application relies on the AES encryption algorithm, while passwords you provide are filtered and read according to MD5 checksums. However, the practice of hiding text inside images is known as steganography, and has been around for quite a while, long before computers were even a piece of fiction.

You can work with pictures under formats like JPG or BMP, and loading one is done through the browse dialog. As far as text is concerned, there’s a limit of 10k characters, with the possibility to paste or load from an existing TXT file. A password also needs to be provided. The original file is not replaced, and a new picture is created, which is required along with the password to extract the hidden message.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that Concealar is a pretty easy method of hiding text messages inside pictures. Just be sure to remember passwords used for all pictures and save the created image, otherwise you’re not able to extract the message.