GhostWriter

GhostWriter is steganography software which I built as a toy for my younger son.

What is steganography? The idea is to hide a message in such a way that no one knows that something has been hidden. The message could be hidden in a picture for example. 

GhostWriter hides the message in the "white spaces" in a text file. These white spaces are normally invisible to the human eye. The text file can be any sufficiently long text file, with an innocuous message, and is called the "cover file".

To encode the message

Start GhostWriter, to get the following screen.

Click on "Select cover file" and select the file "mytext.txt". Click on "Select output file" and select the file "mytext1.txt". Now enter the message string "Hello yourname" (or whatever else you like) in the text box. Click OK. Inspect the file "mytext1.txt". It does not look any different from "mytext.txt". Someone intercepting the message will not normally suspect that it hides any secret message.

To recover the secret message

Click "Select cover file" and select the file "mytext1.txt". Check the "Extract message" box, and click OK. The hidden message would be displayed.

For added security, you can use a password to encrypt the message. This way, even if someone finds out that there is a hidden message, it would still have to be decrypted. If you use a password to hide the message you will need the same password to retrieve it. While extracting an encrypted message you must check "use password", and enter the password before checking "extract message"

The software is free, but installation requires a password. The installation password will be automatically mailed to you at your email address. Send an email to ckr@ckraju.net with "Ghostwriter" in the subject line.

Happy GhostWriting!

Go to top of page

Download GhostWriter setup as a zip file.

Download GhostWriter setup as a self extracting executable.

(Sorry, no msi files yet, but it works on Vista Home Premium.)