3.3.4 S-Tools

Steganography Tools (S-Tools) for Windows 3.00 by Andy Brown is the most versatile steganography tools of any applications tested. It includes several programs that process GIF and BMP images (ST-BMP.EXE), audio WAV files (ST-WAV.EXE) and will even hide information in the "unused" areas on floppy diskettes (ST-FDD.EXE). In addition to supporting 24-bit images, S-Tools also includes a barrage of encryption routines (Idea, MPJ2, DES, 3DES and NSEA) with many options.

S-Tools applies the LSB methods discussed before to both images and audio files. Due to the lack of resources, only images were tested. Brown developed a very nice interface with prompts and well developed on-line documentation. The only apparent limitations were the resources available. There were times large 24-bit images would bring the Windows to a halt. A very useful feature is a status line that displays the largest message size that can be store in an open container file. This saved the time of attempting to store a message that is too large for a container. After hiding the message, the "new" image will be displayed and let you toggle between the new and original images. At times the new image looked to be grossly distorted, but after saving the new image looked nearly identical to the original. This may be due to memory limitations. On occasion a saved image was actually corrupted and could not be read. A saved image should always be reviewed before sending it out.