Text Steganography

Text Steganography is a Paint.net plugin that gives you the possibility to hide text inside images using the steganography technique. Text can be then decoded with the help of this tool.

There is no actual installation involved. To integrate this add-on into Paint.net, it's necessary to copy the downloaded DLL file to the "Effects" directory of Paint.net, then restart the image editor if it was already running. This works whether you have an installer or portable edition available.

In the next step, you can access the extension from the "Effects" menu after opening the graphic file you want to use for hiding the text message. It's a new submenu called "Steganography", which contains two entries for encoding text and decoding pictures.

Clicking "Encode" brings up a small window on the screen, where you can type or paste the text you want to hide, select the bits per character mode between 8 (ASCII) and 16 (Unicode), as well as set the number of bits per channel.

The modifications are made once you save the picture, and the only way you can tell that that something is different is by the file size, since the text slightly increases it. To decode the text, you just have to open the graphic file again and click the "Decode" entry.

While the encoding feature worked smoothly in our evaluation, unfortunately, we failed in our attempts to decode graphic files using the newest Paint.net version on Windows 10 since an error popped up.

All things considered, Text Steganography delivers a simple solution for hiding text messages inside graphic files to securely send them to someone over insecure wireless networks or via email.