Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no-one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message.

By contrast, cryptography obscures the meaning of a message, but it does not conceal the fact that there is a message. Today, the term steganography includes the concealment of digital information within computer files. For example, the sender might start with an ordinary-looking image file, then adjust the color of every 100th pixel to correspond to a letter in the alphabet—a change so subtle that someone who isn’t actively looking for it is unlikely to notice it.

Pict Encrypt uses Steganography to hide a text message within a picture.

Made popular by the movie Along Came a Spider, the encrypted image is, to the visual eye, unchanged.

The How To Encrypt An Image:

1. Start Pict Encrypt.
2. Select the “Encrypt” radio button, click “Next”
3. Click the “Choose Image…” button and browse for a valid image file to import (MacPICT, GIF, JPEG, PNG, or TIFF), click “Next”
4. Enter your message in the text field, and click “Next”
5. Enter the encryption key, and click “Next”
6. Your message has now been encrypted in the image.  Click the “Save Image…” button to save the new picture in MacPICT format.
7. Click “Next”, click “OK” to dismiss the window.

The How To Decrypt An Image:

1. Start Pict Encrypt.
2. Select the “Decrypt” radio button, click “Next”
3. Click the “Choose Image…” button to load the encrypted image (MacPICT format), click “Next”
4. Enter the encryption key, and click “Next”
5. If the key matched, your message will be displayed in the text field.  If not, it will be blank.
6. Click “Next”, click “OK” to dismiss the window.

If you’ve downloaded my example, the passcode is “digitalfreak“.