steganosaurus

like a russian nesting doll, but a nested colorado stegosaurus, a steganosaurus.

one time a thing occurred to me, what's real and what's for sale? blew a kiss and tried to take it home.  well, no... those are lyrics to the stone temple pilots song "vaseline".  though, one time a thing did occur to me, what if one applied the concept of a matryoshka doll to steganography? so... what if? this is if... err, it.  instead of a russian nesting doll, it's a colorado nesting stegosaurus .  rather, a steganosaurus... get it?

fun fact: the stegosaurus is the state fossil of colorado .  i found an image (wmf) of a stegosaurus in microsoft's office clipart collection (which i touched up a bit ).  it was resized (no antialiasing), not resampled (antialiasing), into three smaller images to make for four images (png) in all: 800x800 pixels, 600x600 pixels, 400x400 pixels, and 200x200 pixels.

image file formats like jpeg and png have specifications allowing for any amount of "junk data" to be appended to the file, after the relevant "image" data has been defined.  this makes them ideal for steganography, at least in respects to the "quick and dirty" method i'm using.  there are much more sophisticated methods which require no manipulation or trickery of the image file's specification, such as calculating differences in rgb triplet counts for adjacent pixels moving from right to left, top to bottom, etcetera, etcetera... etcetera.

the process to make this "colorado nesting stegosaurus" was simple.  first, i took the 400x400 pixel image and the base64 encoding of the 200x200 pixel image (as a text file) and copied them into a new image using the windows copy command:

next, i took the 600x600 pixel image and the base64 encoding of the "new image" (as a text file).  rinse and repeat until finally, the base64 encoded ("new") image (as a text file) is copied with the 800x800 pixel image.  by base64 decoding the "junk data" in the final 800x800 pixel image, you get a 600x600 pixel image, and so on and so forth.  thus, there you have it, nested images of a stegosaurus using steganography... a steganosaurus.