Using Steganography & Cryptography to Hide Data in EXE Files

  • Authors

    • Nisha P. Shetty
    • Nikhil Ranjan
    2018-12-19
    https://doi.org/10.14419/ijet.v7i4.41.24289
  • Cryptography, AES, Steganography, SHA-256, EXE file format
  • The most common term we hear when talking about data security is Cryptography; it comprises of practices and study of techniques for secure communication from one party to another without compromising private data that is to be shared between them. The objective of cryptography in simple words is to hide the plain text/data by modifying it into a cypher text/data such that no third party can read it easily. Another term less commonly known is Steganography; it is the process of hiding/encoding a secret message within an ordinary or dummy data file and the simple extraction of it at its destination.Our project aims to combine the best features of the two worlds. The raw data is first compressed, and then split into bytes for encryption via AES. Once encryption is done the encrypted data is hidden behind an exe file. Additionally a SHA-256 hash of the compressed original data is also included to evaluate file integrity.

     

     

     
  • References

    1. [1] Haripriya Rout, Brojo Kishore Mishra,â€Pros and Cons of Cryptography, Steganography and Perturbation techniquesâ€. IOSR Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering (IOSR-JECE) e-ISSN: 2278-2834, PP 76-81. ISSN: 2278-8735

      [2] A. A. Z., A. W. Naji, S. A. Hameed, F. Othman and B. B. Zaidan, "Approved Undetectable-Antivirus Steganography for Multimedia Information in PE-File," 2009 International Association of Computer Science and Information Technology - Spring Conference, Singapore, 2009, pp. 437-441. doi: 10.1109/IACSIT-SC.2009.103

      [3] Davern, P.S, M.G, "Steganography It History and Its Application to Computer Based Data Files", School of Computer Application (SCA), Dublin City University. Working Paper. Studies (WPS), Baghdad, Iraq, 2007.

      [4] Binal Shah &ZahirAalam, “Implementation and Performance Evaluation of the AES Algorithm for Data Transmission using Various Programming Languagesâ€,Communications on Applied Electronics (CAE) – ISSN : 2394-4714 , Foundation of Computer Science FCS, New York, USA Volume 3– No.4, November 2015.

      [5] M.M.Abdulrazzaq, Hilal M. Yousif Al-Bayatti, Moayad A. Fadhil, “A Proposed Technique for Information Hiding in a PE-Fileâ€, Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Technology Research, Vol.3 No.4, December 2013, 153-162.

      [6] Goppit. (2005),†Portable Executable File Format-A Reverse Engineer View†http://www.CodeBreakers-Journal.com. VOL. 2, NO. 3, 2005.

      [7] El-Khalil R., Keromytis A.D. (2004) Hydan: Hiding Information in Program Binaries. In: Lopez J., Qing S., Okamoto E. (eds) Information and Communications Security. ICICS 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3269. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

      [8] D. Artz, "Digital steganography: hiding data within data," in IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 75-80, May-June 2001. doi: 10.1109/4236.935180

      [9] Behrouz A. Forouzan,â€Cryptography & Network Securityâ€. ISBN-13: 978-0-07-0660-46-5, 2007 Indian Edition

      [10] William Stallings, â€Cryptography& Network Security: Principles & Practice†5th Edition’. ISBN 13: 978-0-13- 609704-4

  • Downloads

  • How to Cite

    P. Shetty, N., & Ranjan, N. (2018). Using Steganography & Cryptography to Hide Data in EXE Files. International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7(4.41), 9-14. https://doi.org/10.14419/ijet.v7i4.41.24289