HexaStego-BMP

Security is of utmost importance nowadays, especially with all the threat lurking around most corners of the Internet. Even sending a message can be risky, but this depends on the content and interlocutors. As such, HexaStego-BMP comes with the means to help you hide bits of data inside pictures so that nobody suspects a thing.

The application comes in an incredibly lightweight package, which doesn’t even require installation to function. This means it can fit on a USB flash drive in case you want or need to use it on other computers, keeping stability intact because registry entries are not modified in the process. Note, however, that .NET Framework needs to be installed.

As the name might suggest, the core function of the application is to help you hide files within images, practice known as steganography. There are no visual changes inside pictures, except the file size which gets larger since it contains additional bits of data. There’s not really a limitation to the type of file you can hide inside pictures.

There are a couple fields you need to fill in for the operation to be successful. Unfortunately, there are no browse dialogs to work with, drag and drop is not supported as an import operation, so you need to manually paste or write down the paths and filenames of both the image and source file you want to hide.

As far as supported images are concerned, you can only work with BMP files, which may come as an inconvenience. However, the major downside to the whole operation is that you can only hide up to 50 KB of data, which is highly disappointing. Targeting a larger file doesn’t modify original items, but there’s a high chance the application crashes.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that HexaStego-BMP comes with good intentions, but it’s pretty underprepared to properly handle the task. You can only hide files inside BMP files, while the size of data you can hide leaves much to be desired.