📋 About Black Pigeon

Black Pigeon is a simple Python tool , responsible for hiding various types of data into PNG or JPEG after the EOI marker of the image file to ensure security and privacy.

It is a educational project to understand how EOI steganography works under the hood. For more robust security use LSB steganography. We are currently trying to implement more steganographic methods besides EOI.

❓Why this script?

Black Pigeon is my first ever github repository as well as a scripted journey to the world of cybersecurity without a formal degree in CS. As a high-school student(when I developed the script first) , I tried to document my journey. In a 4GB of RAM old laptop, I entered to the beautiful world of coding and it was my first public project in GitHub.

I know , it seems that Black Pigeon did not entirely follow industry standard best practices but eventually it is my personal project for learning. I hope one day Black Pigeon will be the gold standard and go to choice for security through obscurity with our community collaboration.

Any good advice , guideline and collaboration will be accepted to improve or extend the project.

🤝 How to contribute?

If you want to contribute to Black Pigeon to improve it or add new features for enterprise grade security, please check the issues tab and begin to work with your choice. For personal inquiries and collaboration feel free to reach out via Email as I am not currently active in social-media.

⚙️ How does it work?

To hide file(s) inside the given image, it typically compresses files to be hidden using popular LZMA algorithm to reduce size and create a temporary zip file. Besides it uses cryptographic algorithm to encrypt data during compression process.A popular symmetric cryptographic algorithm called Fernet is used along with a password protection mechanism for users. Then the ZIP file is appended after the EOI(End Of the Image) marker of the given image.

EOI marker for images:

• JPEG/JPG FFD9(HEX)
• PNG 49454E44AE426082(HEX)

🤔 Why does it work?

Modern image parsers don't read image files after the specific EOI marker. Therefore appending any information after EOI marker is a safer choice for hiding information.

Advantages of EOI steganography

• Huge information can be obscured
• It does not affect image quality
• Ommited by modern image parsers

Disadvantages of EOI steganography

• Social media platforms often exclude contents after EOI marker for security reason
• It is insecure compare to modern steganographic methods like LSB steganography
• It is easy to idenify

Make sure Python3 is installed on your system to use this tool.

🛠️ Dependencies

This script was mostly developed using python standard library. Which come in-built with python. Besides some popular third-party libraries are used.

• cryptography(Third-party)
• zipfile
• hashlib
• base64
• os
• sys
• subprocess
• time

📒 Supported Files

1. PNG (.png)
2. JPEG (.jpeg)
3. ZIP (.zip)

💡Features

• Compression
• Decompression
• Encryption
• Decryption
• Steganographic obscuration
• File Injection
• File extration
• Password Protection

🔧Installation

Step 1 :

git clone https://github.com/xenon-computing/black_pigeon.git

Step 2 :

cd black_pigeon

Step 3 :

For Windows :

pip install -r requirements.txt

For Linux/MacOS:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

For Termux:

pkg install python-cryptography

If you are using termux and try to get rid of heavy rust backend for cryptography module , use above command to install the module.

Step 4 (Optional) :

For Linux / Termux:

chmod +x main.py

📖 Usage

1. Aggregate all files to be obscured in a clean and separate directory.
2. Select a cover image file(.png or .jpeg) and copy the path of that image. This image is the carrier of all hidden file(s)
3. Copy the path of the directory.
4. run main.py and select an option mentioned on the menu in the console as your need.
5. To obscure the directory, select option 1 . Then enter necessary information required by the script and don't forget to set a password for better security .
6. For extracting contents from an image where you have obscured info through Black Pigeon , Select correct option from the menu and enter the password key that you set earlier during the encryption process.
7. provide an output path to save extracted information.

🚫 Warnings

• All types of path mentioned earlier have to be absolute, not relative
• Don't try to hide larger file(s), if your system doesn't have enough RAM, as currently we are using RAM to load and process file(s) for obscuration.
• Use the tool at your own risk in an isolated environment.