StegoSecretS

StegoSecretS combines AES-256 encryption, Shamir's Secret Sharing (SSS) and steganography!

It helps you share a secret among other trusted peers, keeping a minimum threshold of keys to recover the original one. The partial keys will also be hidden inside images, adding an additional layer of "security".

Note: the project is under active development. The APIs are subject to change!

Quickstart

Installation

You can install the stego CLI with brew

brew install enrichman/tap/stegosecrets

or getting the latest release, or building it from source.

Encrypt / Decrypt

TLDR: go to the usage section for more details

stego encrypt --file mysecret.txt --parts 5 --threshold 3

stego decrypt --file mysecret.txt.enc --img 001.jpg --key 002.key --img 003.jpg

How does it work?

Alice wants to protect her new "patent pending nuclear blender project" from EvilCompany.
They want it, so she asks her friends Bob, Charlie and Dave to keep it safe.
She trusts them, but to add an additional layer of security she emails them an encrypted file and an image of a cat containing a special key. 🐈

With this special key Bob alone is not able to decrypt the secret, so even if someone from EvilCompany gets the hands on his secret it will be useless. They will still need to get Charlie's and Dave's keys.

Ok, but.. how does it work?

An input file (or message) will be encrypted using AES-256 with a crypto secure random 32 bit key. This key will be then split in p parts with Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm (SSS).
A t threshold of partial keys is needed to recover the original one and decrypt the secret.

For example, encrypting the file having 5 parts with a threshold of 3 will split the master-key into 5 pieces. These pieces will be also hidden into 5 images. To reconstruct the original master key at least 3 partial keys and/or images are needed.

Usage

encrypt

To encrypt a file you can explicit the filename:

stego encrypt --file mysecret.txt -p 5 -t 3

or you can write the message:

-> % stego encrypt -p 5 -t 3
Enter text: my secret message

This will generate (a lot) of files:

# out
mysecret.txt.checksum
mysecret.txt.enc
mysecret.txt.enc.checksum
mysecret.txt.key

001.jpg
001.jpg.checksum
001.key
002.jpg
002.jpg.checksum
002.key
...
005.jpg
005.jpg.checksum
005.key

Main files:

• mysecret.txt.checksum is the sha256 checksum of the mysecret.txt file (used to check a successful decryption)
• mysecret.txt.enc is the encrypted file
• mysecret.txt.enc.checksum is the sha256 checksum of the mysecret.txt.enc
• mysecret.txt.key is the master key used to encrypt/decrypt the secret

Partial files:

• n.key the n partial key
• n.jpg the n image where the n partial key is hidden
• n.jpg.checksum is the sha256 checksum of the n.jpg image

Note: If no parts are specified the master-key will not be split. Keep it safely stored or delete it.

Checksums can be used to check the integrity of the files:

-> % sha256sum --check mysecret.txt.enc.checksum
mysecret.txt.enc: OK

decrypt

To decrypt a file just use enough keys and/or images:

stego decrypt --file mysecret.txt.enc --key 001.key --key 002.key --img 003.jpg

also the master key alone can be used to decrypt the file:

stego decrypt --file mysecret.txt.enc --master-key mysecret.txt.key

images

To hide the partial keys with steganography you will need a folder with some images.
To get some random images from https://picsum.photos/ the images command can be used. They will be stored in the images folder.

stego images