Show HN: Stegcore – steganography and steganalysis in one Rust binary

Stegcore hides encrypted messages inside everyday pictures and sound files. The file still looks and sounds completely normal. Nobody can tell it contains a hidden message, not your internet provider, not a border agent, not a forensic analyst with professional tools.

Your data never leaves your device. No accounts. No cloud. No telemetry. No network connections of any kind. One passphrase to hide, the same passphrase to recover.

If someone ever forces you to hand over a password, give them the decoy one. Stegcore can hold two messages in the same file, each with its own passphrase. Nobody looking at the file can tell which half has the real message, or that a second message exists at all.

Steganalysis at Aletheia parity.Stegcore matches[Aletheia], the public reference for steganalysis, on three classical detectors (Sample Pair Analysis, RS, Weighted Stego) to floating-point precision, and runs roughly 100× faster on the RS code path in Rust. Detector thresholds are calibrated against real clean images (Cassavia 2022, BOSSbase 1.01 and an ALASKA2 sample) at a documented low false-alarm rate, never guessed. Everything else (embedding, extracting, encryption, deniable mode, GUI, CLI) is production-ready.

What is under the hood #

Three authenticated ciphers (Ascon-128, ChaCha20-Poly1305, AES-256-GCM). Argon2id for turning passphrases into encryption keys, tuned to make brute force painful. Adaptive embedding that picks noisy parts of the cover file so the hidden data disappears into the natural grain. Deniable dual-payload mode. Steganalysis suite at Aletheia parity on the classical SPA / RS / WS detectors, plus tiered structural tool fingerprinting (Exact and Heuristic). Desktop GUI and CLI. One small native binary.

Grab the latest release for your platform from the Releases page.

Same URL works on Linux, macOS and Windows. Detects your platform automatically.

Linux and macOS:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/The-Malware-Files/Stegcore/main/install | sh

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/The-Malware-Files/Stegcore/main/install | iex

Installer options #

STEGCORE_VERSION=v4.0.1 curl -fsSL .../install.sh | bash

STEGCORE_DIR=/opt/stegcore curl -fsSL .../install.sh | bash

bash install.sh --uninstall
.\install.ps1 -Component both          # CLI plus GUI
.\install.ps1 -Version v4.0.1          # Pin version
.\install.ps1 -Uninstall               # Remove
.\install.ps1 -DryRun                  # Preview only
cargo build --workspace --release

This produces the CLI at target/release/stegcore

. For the desktop app, run cargo tauri build

from the repo root.

stegcore wizard

stegcore embed cover.png secret.txt -o stego.png

stegcore extract stego.png -o recovered.txt

stegcore analyse suspect.png

stegcore analyse *.png --json

echo "secret" | stegcore embed cover.png - -o stego.png
stegcore extract stego.png --raw | xxd
stegcore score cover.png        # Is this file a good hiding spot?
stegcore diff cover.png stego.png   # Show the pixel difference
stegcore info stego.png         # Read metadata (needs the passphrase)
stegcore ciphers                # List available encryption options
stegcore doctor                 # System health check
stegcore benchmark              # Test how fast your machine runs the ciphers
stegcore completions bash       # Shell completion setup
stegcore verse                  # A small daily encouragement

Full flag reference: stegcore --help

.

Launch Stegcore, then follow the step-by-step wizards for hiding, recovering, or checking files. Drag and drop works everywhere.

Analysis history stays on your device. Nothing leaves.

We compare against the tools we have actually run side by side (Steghide and OpenStego). Broader head-to-head benchmarks are an ongoing effort.

Stegcore is built in public, so we are specific about what it catches and what it does not.

Classical detectors at Aletheia parity. Sample Pair Analysis, RS and Weighted Stego match the publicAletheiareference to floating-point precision, and run far faster in Rust.Strong on spatial least-significant-bit replacement at moderate and higher payloads, and on tools that leave a structural fingerprint (OpenStego, for example), where a hit is effectively decisive.Hard, and we say so. Very low payloads, LSB-matching, and JPEG-domain hiding are difficult for classical steganalysis. Stegcore does not pretend otherwise.

Per-release detection numbers, measured on public datasets against Aletheia, are published in the changelog. You can rerun the analysis on your own files:

stegcore analyse your-images/*.png --json > your-scores.jsonl

Stegcore is dual-licensed.

AGPL-3.0-or-later: the default. Free for individuals, researchers, open-source projects, NGOs, and anyone willing to release their own derivative source under the same terms. SeeLICENSE.Commercial licence: for organisations that want to build on Stegcore inside proprietary software, internal tools, or hosted services without the AGPL source-release obligation. SeeCOMMERCIAL.md.

Either licence applies to the same codebase; you pick the one that fits your situation. The Acceptable Use Policy applies regardless of which licence you use.

Contact: ops@themalwarefiles.com