Learn How to Hide Data in Images with Python Steganography

Python Image Steganography – Learn How To Hide Data in Images

Image Steganography is the science of hiding messages and data inside of images, allowing information to be shared without anyone suspecting. In this article, we’ll explore how to use Python to hide data inside images with steganography. We’ll walk through a few examples of how this is done, and learn about some of the different methods for hiding information inside an image.

What is Steganography?

Steganography is the practice of hiding a message or data within another file such as an image, audio file, or even a document. The goal of steganography is to make it difficult for someone to detect the presence of the hidden message. With the use of steganography, secret information can be securely transferred between parties without being detected by a third party.

How Does Steganography Work?

The most popular steganography technique is to replace the least significant bits (LSB) of the bytes that make up an image with new data bits. These new bits are used to store the hidden message. This technique works because the human eye typically doesn’t notice small changes in the color of an image. By replacing the LSBs of the image, we can hide data inside the image while not noticeably changing the appearance of the image.

Using Python for Image Steganography

In this article, we’ll be using Python to hide data in images using the LSB technique. To do this, we’ll be using the Pillow library. Pillow is a powerful imaging library used for handling and transforming images. This library can be installed using pip with the following command:

pip install Pillow

Once installed, we can import the library into our Python program with the following code:

from PIL import Image 

Hiding Data in an Image Using Python

Now that we have the Pillow library imported, we can start to hide our data inside an image. To begin, we first need to open the image that we would like to hide data in. This can be done with the Pillow library’s open() function:

image = Image.open("sample_image.jpg")

Now we can begin to hide our data inside the image. To do this, we will use the LSB technique by replacing the least significant bits of each byte of the image with our data bits. To do this, we first need to convert the image’s data into a binary format. We can do this with the Pillow library’s getdata() function:

image_data = list(image.getdata())

Once the image data has been converted to a binary format, we can begin to replace the least significant bits of each byte with our data bits. This can be done with a simple loop:

for i in range(len(image_data)):
    image_data[i] = (image_data[i] & 0xfc) | data_bits[i]

The above code replaces the least significant two bits of each byte with the corresponding data bit from the data_bits array. Once this process is complete, we can save the modified image data back to an image file with the Pillow library’s save() function:

image.putdata(image_data)
image.save("modified_image.jpg")

This will save the modified image with the hidden data to “modified_image.jpg”.

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at how to use Python to hide data in images with steganography. We explored how to use the Pillow library to open an image and replace the least significant bits of the image’s bytes with data bits. We then saved the modified image with the hidden data to a file. By using this method, we can securely transfer data without anyone suspects.