:zap: Worlds fastest steghide cracker, chewing through millions of passwords per second :zap:
:zap: Worlds fastest steghide cracker, chewing through millions of passwords per second :zap:
Stegseek is a lightning fast steghide cracker that can be used to extract hidden data from files. It is built as a fork of the original steghide project and, as a result, it is thousands of times faster than other crackers and can run through the entirety of rockyou.txt* in under 2 seconds.
Stegseek can also be used to extract steghide metadata without a password, which can be used to test whether a file contains steghide data.
*
rockyou.txtis a well-known password list with over 14 million passwords.
Skip ahead to Performance for some raw numbers.
The following instructions walk you through the installation process. Alternatively, you can run Stegseek in a Docker container. Skip ahead to Docker for instructions.
On recent Ubuntu and other Debian-based systems, you can use the provided .deb package for installation:
.deb file using sudo apt install ./stegseek_0.6-1.debOn other systems you will have to build Stegseek yourself. See BUILD.md for more information.
Building Stegseek as a native Windows app is sadly not supported. Instead you should run Stegseek using WSL. The Ubuntu WSL distribution is recommended for optimal compatibility.
Once you have configured WSL, Stegseek can be installed using the above Linux instructions.
By default, WSL mounts the C:\ drive at /mnt/c/, which you can use to easily access your files.
The most important feature of stegseek is wordlist cracking:
stegseek [stegofile.jpg] [wordlist.txt]
This mode will simply try all passwords in the provided wordlist against the provided stegofile.
Stegseek can also be used to detect and extract any unencrypted (meta) data from a steghide image. This exploits the fact that the random number generator used in steghide only has 2^32 possible seeds, which can be bruteforced in a matter of minutes.
stegseek --seed [stegofile.jpg]
This command will tell you:
If you're (very) lucky and the file was encoded without encryption, this mode will even recover the encoded file for you!
The below demo features a challenge from X-MAS CTF 2020. A flag was hidden using a secure random password, but without encryption enabled. Within a few minutes, Stegseek is able to recover the embedded file without needing to guess the correct password.
Use stegseek --help to get the full list of available options:
…
Stegseek includes nearly all of steghide's functionality, so it can also be used to embed or extract data as normal. The only catch is that commands must use the --command format.
For example, steghide embed [...] becomes stegseek --embed [...] .
stegseek --embed []stegseek --extract []You can also run Stegseek as Docker container:
docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd):/steg" rickdejager/stegseek [stegofile.jpg] [wordlist.txt]
This does require that the wordlist and stegofile are located in current working directory, as that folder is mounted to /steg inside of the container.
This is where Stegseek really shines. As promised, let's start with the "rockyou.txt in just 2 seconds" claim.
All of these numbers are measured on a laptop with an Intel i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz and 8 GB of RAM.
I picked the last password in rockyou.txt without control characters: "␣␣␣␣␣␣␣1" (7 spaces followed by '1').
This password is on line 14344383 out of 14344391
> StegSeek 0.6 - https://github.com/RickdeJager/StegSeek
[i] Found passphrase: " 1"
[i] Original filename: "secret.txt".
[i] Extracting to "7spaces1.jpg.out".
real 0m1,211s
user 0m9,488s
sys 0m0,084s
And there it is, over 14 million passwords in less than 2 seconds :heart_eyes:.
To test the performance of of other tools, I created several stego files with different passwords, taken from rockyou.txt. I ran each of the tools with their default settings, except Stegbrute where I increased threading for a fair comparison.
| password | Line | Stegseek v0.6 | Stegcracker 2.0.9 | Stegbrute v0.1.1 (-t 8) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "cassandra" | 1 000 | 0.05s | 3.1s | 0.7s |
| "kupal" | 10 000 | 0.05s | 14.4s | 7.1s |
| "sagar" | 100 000 | 0.09s | 2m23.0s | 1m21.9s |
| "budakid1" | 1 000 000 | 0.73s | [p] 23m50.0s | 13m45.7s |
| "␣␣␣␣␣␣␣1" | 14 344 383 | 1.21s | [p] 5h41m52.5s | [p] 3h17m38.0s |
[p] = projected time based on previous results.
To compare the speed of each tool, let's look at the last row of the table (otherwise Stegseek finishes before all threads have started).
At this scale Stegseek is over 12 000 times faster than Stegcracker and over 7000 times faster than Stegbrute.
2021-04-18
improvements:
--continue flag to search for multiple hidden files.--accessible flag to make the CLI more screen reader friendly--crack and --seed now throw proper exit codes for easier scripting.2020-12-28
improvements:
--seed2020-12-01
improvements:
rockyou.txt in 2 seconds2020-12-23
Fixed a bug where stegseek would fail to find a password on rare occasions.
2020-11-08
improvements:
-xf argument to --crack, used to specify the location of the extracted filerockyou.txt in 4 seconds2020-11-05
improvements:
rockyou.txt in 5 seconds.2020-11-04
Initial release, features:
rockyou.txt in 41 seconds.No open issues yet, or sync has not completed.