How to protect cryptocurrencies with steganography?

Welcome to Hoken Tech

Securing the private key of a blockchain address is a major concern, as the private key is the only way to access and use the funds held in that address. If an attacker gains access to the private key of an address, he can easily steal the funds in that address and transfer them to another address of his choice. Therefore, it is imperative to properly secure the private key and ensure that it is accessible only to the owner of the address.

There are several strategies to protect the private key of a blockchain address, such as:

Steganography is a technique for hiding a message or information within another piece of information, making the message difficult for unauthorized persons to locate or decipher. In other words, steganography is a method of transmitting information secretly, so that only the recipient can understand it.

Steganography can be used in different forms of communication, such as written texts, images, audio, and video. For example, in one image, the message can be hidden by slightly changing the color of some pixels, so that the message is only visible if you examine them

edited pixels carefully. In an audio file, the message can be hidden by slightly changing the intensity of some sounds, such that the message is only audible if you listen carefully to the audio file. Steganography is often used to convey information sensitive or confidential, such as passwords or confidential information. However, it can also be used for illegal purposes, such as disseminating propaganda or misleading advertising.

To protect the steganographic message, it is usually used an encryption key, is used to encrypt the message in such a way that only the recipient, in possession of the correct key, can decrypt it. The steganography process can be divided into two stages:

As we said previously, in order to proceed to encrypt the message we must make use of specific tools, and in the blockchain and non-blockchain spheres, several developers have created useful tools to be able to hide and encrypt a text, which in the crypto sphere can be either the alphanumeric private key or the seed of our wallet.

As far as the seed is concerned, we can make use of the code created by James Stanley to be able to hide the seed within a randomly generated but meaningful text that hides the various words of the seed.

So first of all, after copying the code offline and starting everything locally, we can insert the words of the seed (usually 12 or 24), and then we click on the "Stego" button:

At this point the code will produce a text that we could save inside another larger text and thus "camouflage" it to the inattentive eyes of a potential reader:

Instead, to discover the seed starting from the relatively generated text, simply paste the previously saved text, and this time press the "Unstego" button:

And here we will be shown the seed that we had previously hidden.

As someone may have noticed, this system lends itself well to hiding the seed, but with the single strings of the private keys, usually very long and without sensible words, this system turns out to be impracticable, and therefore we have to take advantage of another tool that allows us to enter any type of text.

This time a tool that comes to our rescue is that called “Steg Cloak” created by the Kuro Labs team which allows us not only to enter any text and hide it with steganography but also adds a layer of protection as it allows us to add a password to the processed text, making it virtually impossible to decipher of the message without the encryption password.

In this case, the first step to do is to enter the text to be encrypted, suppose a private key, in our example this string 0x5451bc7Bba9DA0f1cd4d8Dcb863b6857513566A5, then add a protection password, in our case "Happy Holidays", and finally write the output that we want to share, in our case "Happy Holidays to everyone", in fact in this case even if the encrypted message is on display, no one will know that it hides the private key of our blockchain address, and finally we press the "Hide ”:

The reverse procedure to be able to reveal the hidden text, where we just need to copy and paste the previous text masked with steganography, enter the unlock password we entered, and click on the "Get Secret" button:

Thanks to this system we can easily publish our encrypted private key online, or otherwise store it in a text file such as a text document, and this step is crucial as only that particular processed text will have all the hidden information, and not a simple text written from the keyboard, and this is also a limitation if we want to print the message on a piece of paper, as only the digital version of the information will have the encrypted message, while the paper version will have no value and will not conceal any information.

In conclusion, we have seen how to protect private keys we can use interesting tools and exploit cryptography to hide our private information, such as our private keys, in an ingenious and complex way.