Hiding keyfiles in images

Steganography is a process of hiding information such as messages, files and images in other files or images.

The advantage of using Steganography is that it’s nigh-on impossible to tell if any image or file holds secret information. Compare this with regular cryptography, such as the one deployed with Tomb to create the keyfile. Due to its very name, having a .key extension, the keyfiles can easily be identified, and subjected to attacks such as brute force to break their password protection.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could mask your keyfiles within seemingly benign files? Thankfully, Tomb makes it quite easy to bury keyfiles within JPEG images, using the steghide utility, which you can install from your distributions software repositories.

Once installed, you can use the tomb bury -k hidey-hole.tomb.key imagename.jpg command.

The command also retains the original keyfile, but you can now choose to lock or open the tomb using the image file instead: tomb open -k ~/Pictures/ Wallpapers/P1040866.JPG hidey-hole.tomb .

Should you decide to extract the keyfile from an image, you can do that with the tomb exhume command. The command expects two arguments. You must provide a name for the keyfile to be extracted from the image. This could be the same, or different from the original keyfile name. You must also provide the name of the image file that was used to bury the keyfile: tomb exhume -k keyfile.key imagename.jpg . The associated keyfile will be extracted only if you correctly input the password associated with the keyfile.