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 Official SSI Standard Thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1558778.msg15647568) | SSI #1 on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4u7vrq/release_of_an_open_source_software_which_stores/)

About

This standards uses two cryptography techniques. The first one, AES encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard) 128-bits X2, 32 character hash (which locks your data), and finally Steganography  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography)(which hides your data).

In this protocol, wallets are created offline, encrypted, and stored within the pixels of an image as RGB data. This makes it impossible to know whether there's any encrypted bitcoin wallet on your computer, since they can now be storing using colours, in images.

Project Bitcoin talk (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1558778.msg15647568#msg15647568)
Project GitHub (https://github.com/wisdomcsharp/SSI---Bitcoin-Storage)

Project Download (https://github.com/wisdomcsharp/SSI---Bitcoin-Storage/tree/master/latest release)


[Figure 1.0] - offline wallet generation & storage
https://i.imgur.com/rqQv6f1.jpg (http://imgur.com/rqQv6f1)
Support us: By specifying useful, researched protocols, and open-source software implementations.

Example

For anyone looking for an example, you can download one here http://imgur.com/gallery/lgTwF
One contains no data, the other contains a wallet with 100 keys. The password to unlock the encrypted flower is: flower

Original image
https://i.imgur.com/ka9g1Ey.png (http://imgur.com/ka9g1Ey)

flower image with a wallet, storing 100 keys
https://i.imgur.com/VuhcZ4C.png (http://imgur.com/VuhcZ4C)
The size of the stored data is 4.22kb. The size of the original file is 1.61MB. The size of the encrypted file is 0.99MB

So how do I decrypt the successive image that is encrypted?
Isn't this one hell of a work to encrypt an image and decrypt it summarily?

And is there any way a user can steal the private key through the image's metadata? Or does it strip all the metadata before encryption?

This is all in all pretty amazing. So i can now store my bitcoins in a paper picture? Or does it have to be digital only? Either way this opens up some major possibilities for stashing away those coins in hard to find places. I might have to give this a whirl with a small amount just to see how it works exactly.

The software provides facilities to encrypt & decrypt your encrypted private key from the image. The encrypted data are not store as meta data, they are converted to 1's and 0's and added to the RGB data (colour) inside each pixel in an image (Steganography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography)).

So in short, it increases the colour intensity, or reduces it (which is a form of storage) that can be used to store data. The best thing is, the image size should be absolutely the same!

It is great. The image has to be in a digital format. But please don't forget your password or the image you used!

We're looking at storing bitcoin wallets in audio files next, hopefully more options for stashing away bitcoin wallets will be out there

Im going to download it and give it a try once someone else can verify that the file is clean, No offense to yourself im sure it is but obviously better safe than sorry. Can i ask if i send a photo that has the wallet encrypted from say my pc to my phone then through various other devices will it still decrypt fine or will the picture quality degrade slightly and become unusable?  For instance if i send via whatsapp then it might resize the photo or compress it then i guess it will no longer work?

Audio files sounds awesome too, people could have bitcoins literally hidden everywhere.

It all depends on how each software handles the images. Some websites purposefully degrade images to save disk-space. I don't think you'll have any problems. But if you do need validation, you can install apps such as HashStamp (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=leonidpeter.hashstamp&hl=en), then compare the image checksum to confirm that no changes has been made. I know 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) allows you (on windows, with right-click) to check the "CRC SHA" checksum for files.

tl;dr: make sure the checksum  (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/checksum)values are verified each time you transmit the image file.

I have read about this technology before and it sounds like a really class move forward...... ;D

This is really cool.  This will probably be the most secure way of protecting your bitcoins without a hardware wallet until malware/hackers start to look for it.

Vinyl has been done before, though they are redesigning the website currently and have little information available on their website but the Coindesk article has much more:  

http://www.coindesk.com/new-sound-wallet-stores-private-keys-vinyl/
http://soundwallet.net/

Regardless, more competition is not a bad thing.

This is fantastic. The fact that im not using paper wallets it's because they are an obvious target. If someone ever finds it it's like "hey guys, there's bitcoins here! let's pick this up". If they see some irrelevant picture of a cat or something, they will never guess there's a private key there.

The question is: Can you still add a password lip BIP38 paper wallets? There's no way im getting a paper wallet of any kind unless it requests a password to unlock it.

Great question!

At the moment, the passwords are converted to SHA1, divided by 2 and encrypted in AES 128-bit 2-times (because we can). It only exports as .JSON file, which is what electrum and blockchain.info uses. An option to export it as an encrypted BIP38 might be added. I'm pretty much brain-dead from working on this project.

BUT! I'm excited we've managed to produce a game-changing technology for the community!

Thank you for posting this!
I've done some basic steganography and watched some presentations about it (Defcon, Blackhat etc)
It's a very interesting topic and certainly a cool technology.
I will check this out when I have some time later today.   8)

Amazing work- this is awesome  :)

Concept is cool. But I want to try it out ASAP.
Are you hiring beta testers for testing them out and reporting any bugs/loopholes if found? Let me know because I am highly interested in it.

Btw, on a scale of 1 to 10, how secure is this going to be compared to the well known traditional paper wallets?

By the looks of it it will be more secure than a paper wallet because you would have to know that a certain picture contains private keys.

I downloaded the file but is there anyway to make it a simple exe or installer? im not too sure how to install it at the moment but would like to give it a try.

Edit:- also a phone version would be nice in the future where i could just select an image within my phone and then decrypt it and put the bitcoins straight into my wallet for instance mycelium.

Excellent work!  I haven't tried it yet but have a question:
You can load any image and your software detects if there's stenography?  Or is it based on let's say a password, then that password applies stenography techniques to pic?

What I'm getting at is can your code be modified and go through every pic on a computer and detect pics that have a wallet on them?

Great question, the software itself (or myself for that matter) don't even know how to detect which image contains steganography data. its all based on the password, if the data decryption process fails, then thats it. Its either you know the password, know it has someone in it, or you don't.


> I could introduce a package installer later. but it's pretty easy to install. Just download java, unzip the app & run it.
> A phone version would be great at least when we've added all the features that we didn't get to. It would also make it much more easy to use "on the fly"

This is interesting... Have you tried to encrypt an image, print it, scan it and decrypt it? This would be epic if something like this was possible.

...

Steganography looks like a great emerging technology that may become very important in safeguarding our BTC (not to mention our freedoms).

Please keep us up to date on your efforts, you are doing great work.  :)  Two thumbs up!

The step after the next would be to make your software easy-to-use for us non-tekkies.

nice work, but I'd like to add a couple of general  comments on steganography which are very important for anyone who wants to use it to store real money.

First of all, steganography for now is  not nearly on the same level of security as cryptography.  In fact, *every* steganographic method can be broken with currently available stegoanalitic methods(which are typically statistical methods).  The only question is whether there is enough data, but practical amounts are sufficient (no astronomical figures like in crypto).
While it is easy to hide something in an image so that the image with hidden data looks the same to a human eye, it is so far practically impossible to hide anything from statistical analysis methods.


The only practical use of steganography is obfuscation. If you want to hide the fact that you are storing private keys on a machine from someone who is not too much intent on finding them, then it's useful. Otherwise it's not.  For example, a security agent at the border which decides to do a "random" Check of your laptop will probably not find anything. If there was a "tip off" on you - then they probably will.

Another note: these methods are typically very sensitive to any change in the image such as rescaling, change of resolution, not to mention printing/ scanning etc. Be careful and check in advance how much destortion the steganographic method is designed to handle (typically - no distortion).

The above are just general considerations, I didn't check which methods OP used. (Besides, there are off-the-shlef stego methods which you can use to hide any files, not only wallets/ private keys.)

Okay, if you suspect an image contains a wallet, place the image into the app, then enter the password to decrypt the AES data.

It uses a mixture of cryptography (encrypting) and steganography (hiding). So if you suspect something, you now have to know the password to see if you'll get anywhere.

I guess my aim is to move the target from just wallet.dat files to everything such as: pictures, audio files, movies, videos! anything could contain a private key.

Very nice indeed. this sw should be standard since years. I am surprised it comes so late and highly welcome it!

A few questions:

• Q.1: does the sw detect that the image contains a bitcoin key when entering the correct password even offline (e.g. by some header info or checksum after correct password entering), or is every image-password-combination a valid key? --> the latter would be better because:

• it would make the image even more difficult to brute-force! (you'd have to check with the blockchain each time you try a new password)
• it would provide powerful means against the "$5-wrench-attack": you can store two (or more) keys in one image via two (or more) different passwords and load different amounts on it. should you ever get attacked with a "$5-wrench", you give away your dummy key with a small amount of btc and plausibly deny existence of another key.

• Q.2: I understand that the privkey is stored in the 1 or 2 LSBs of each pixel's 8-bit RGB values, probably after XOR-ing with "sha1(password)"-bit-sequence or sth. like that. But this means that a *.png image would increase in size, compared to the original image, if the original *.png image contains sequences of pixels of identical colours, due to *.png's lossless compression (run lenght encoding). So the original image should preferably be an image that already contains some "noise" on the LSBs, do I understand correctly?
• Q.3: Does the SW support only individual keys or also HD keys with 12-to-24-word mnemonics acc to BIP32/39/44?

Great questions

A.1 the software relies on decryption errors. At the moment it should break or throw an error if the AES library can't decrypt the data. It doesn't stored bitcoin keys, it stores AES encrypted data, which happens to contain bitcoin keys. you can read more about this steganography library on this PDF (http://hidereveal.ncottin.net/download/HideAndReveal.pdf)

A.2 The output PNG image should be less than the original. I have an original PNG image which is 14.8MB and an output which is 9.36MB

A.3 At the moment the SW only supports individual keys since this is the first-iteration / release of it. You can make request by following the below quote

I think it depends how you do it.

Imagine you have your "original" image that you want to modify to include your key via steganography. If your original image satisfies certain characteristics, I am sure you couldn't tell if the post-processed image contains steganography or not.

Here is how I construct my "original" image:

* take a camera picture.

* add noise on it and save as *.png (lossless format)

The noise addition follows this algorithm: For each pixel take each original 8bit rgb value and replace the LSB (rightmost least significant bit) by a random 0/1.

And here's how I hide my 256 bit bitcoin private key (pk)  inside this image:

* calculate y = "pk" XOR "sha256(myPassword)"

where XOR is a bit-wise operation of 256 bits.

y is a 256 bit sequence that looks absolutely random, also from statistical analysis point of view.

* I replace the first 256 "noise LSBs" of the image by "y".

Done!

So A1 reads: No, not every image-password combination is a priv key, and you can tell from wrong password that the password is wrong without checking the blockchain.

About A2: This is strange. How can it happen? And does it also happen if the original image is a computer screen shot that typically contains many successive pixels of identical colour?

I'm still shocked myself. I truly wasn't expecting PNG output files which were less than the original. All the images I've been using have been computer screen shots, except for the flower one, which i got from google. It's output was also less than the original.

I am not an expect in steganography but from common sense I am amusing that there is a way bigger risk that if you print it and save it physically like a paper wallet, it's way easier for the key to corrupt and not be able to read it back because of way too many colors and stuff on the game. Like the image can deteriorate physically (from the paper rotting over time and so on) and then the device trying to scan it will have a hard time guessing the key.

On the contrary with a classic normal QR code it's way simpler there fore easier for the device to scan it.

you are not meant to print and rescan the image with the method of this thread. This won't work.

I'm scared that people would actually print this out and actually expect to get a private key from the scanned printout. If you print it out and delete the output copy on your computer, you're pretty much screwed. It's not mean't to be printed out, please use something like QR instead.

This kind of steganography-- hiding data in the least significant bits of images-- is _very_ easily detected by statistical methods, and there are many papers and tools (stegdetect, for jpeg as an example) to do so.

At a minimum, something hoping to perform successful image steg embedding should be using wet paper codes.

I think the best method to combine with this is to add 10 000 images for example and only you know which 1 contains your private keys. Someone would have to work through all that images to try to

isolate which one you used to store the private keys. The general public will pick up a memory stick, and they would store images on it, and nobody would ever suspect that it contains a single image

with 1000's of bitcoins stored on a Bitcoin address hidden in one of theose images.  ::)

For one thing, I'm really happy to get your input about this implementation! Perhaps I'll try out the wet paper codes within the first packaged released of this project.

This is truly amazing

post #25's method should be safe.

Thats some pretty untested software, that could mess up o make unrecoverable private keys.
:| first testing, then crazy ideas like that :P

It'd be nice to update the title as this has nothing to do with hardware wallets - the main purpose of a hardware wallet is to run the cryptographic code on dedicated hardware so that a malware will not steal your coins.

Many people do not realize that Romana Machado wrote a very early Steganography program (possibly the first one).  She was an Extropian associate of Nick Szabo.

from 1994:
=========================

List:       cypherpunks
Subject:    Party with the Nextropians! at Nexus-Lite!
From:       plaz () netcom ! com (Geoff Dale)
Date:       1994-02-26 21:40:48
[Download message RAW]

         MEET THE NEXTROPIANS: WE ARE HERE AND NOW AMONG YOU
__________________________________________________________________________
Romana Machado - Geoff Dale - David Gordon - Nick Szabo - Russell Whitaker

=========================

And another Extropian was Hal Finney, the first recipient of Bitcoin.

…while the others contain random garbage steghidden. Otherwise as a couple of chaps already said, the only one hiding information will stand out.

An additional twist is N images/audios/videos containing an M-of-N secret sharing scheme.

wow this is great project   8)

I'm actually super interested in learning more about this. Awesome stuff.

This is new to me. I don't know how it works and how is the security protocols are made
This may sounds good but right now I have a long time to study how the encryption is done and its relation to the image.
For now I'll gonna wait for some update. But thanks for opening it up on this forum, its something new and interesting.