This web application provides a simple way for effective image steganography designed to hide larger amount of data in an image file by replacing an entire color component of the carrier image instead of a few bits so you can hide much more data than a simple message. On the con, this method is much weaker than the traditional image steganorgaphy so you should choose a carrier image with a strong dominant color palette and hide the data by replacing the weakest color component to make this steganography less noticable. If it is essential to hide your data properly, you should choose a different steganography tool as this module was designed to hide large amount of data instead of hiding data deep in the carrier image to make finding the data nearly impossible.

To install this web application, you need a web server supporting PHP 5.4 or later with PHP's GD and OpenSSL extensions.

Place this entire repository somewhere in your web server's document root directory. A subdirectory should also work.

Once the web application is installed on your web server, navigate to index.php and follow the instructions in your web browser.

To embed PHP steganography class in a separate web application, place include/class.php_stego.php and include/class.aes.php files in your web application and include the class in the corresponding script as you can see bellow:

require_once 'class.php_stego.php';
...
$php_stego = new PHP_STEGO();
//if $bin_to_image = 1, binary data fill be converted to an image
//binary data will be extracted from the image otherwise
$php_stego->set_encoding_direction($bin_to_image);
$php_stego->set_carrier_data($carrier_image_data);
$php_stego->set_input_data($binary_data_to_encode);
$php_stego->set_encryption_key('Your Password');
$output_image_data = $php_stego->convert();

To extract the encoded binary data, do the following:

...
$php_stego->set_input_data($output_image_data);
$php_stego->set_encoding_direction(false);
$output_file = $php_stego->convert();

For further information on how to use the class, check include/convert.php script.

This project consists of multiple components, each with its own license. When using this project, carefully choose based on the license of the component you intend to use:

• The core PHP application (located in include directory) is licensed under a modified MIT license (©2024 Robert Abraham) and phpAES (MIT) license (for compatibility module).

• The Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the web application (located in this directory excluding the include subdirectory) was built using standard jQuery (located in javascript subdirectory) and is licensed under MIT.

Both licenses allow commercial use under the corresponding conditions. For more details, please refer to the license.md file.