Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding the spying activities of the U.S. government and others dealta devastating blow to some of the bedrocks of information security, including the trustworthiness of encryption and virtual private networks (VPN). Now, organizations worldwide must deal with the reality of government entities viewing sensitive corporate secrets, and even the possibility of malicious actors uncovering the same backdoors used by the NSA to steal valuable data. What can enterprises do to protect data during transmission when encryption and VPNs aren’t bulletproof?

The OpenPuff steganography tool, created by engineer Cosimo Oliboni, can add an extra layer of protection for those sensitive documents. In this SearchSecurity screencast, Keith Barker, a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and trainer for CBT Nuggets LLC, explains how to use OpenPuff to hide encrypted data in other files when being sent. OpenPuff is a free tool that gives practically any organization the ability to utilize steganography.

Barker begins the OpenPuff tutorial with a useful overview of steganography and why it is used in addition to encryption. He then explains the process of encoding data in another file, known as the carrier. The sender simply fills in the information to form the key needed for decryption, which includes up to three passwords, the name of the carrier file and the bit option used to encode the data. In a matter of seconds, sensitive info can be hidden in an innocuous file such as .mp3, .jpg, Adobe documents and many other formats, with size being the only difference between the original and carrier files On the other end, the recipient only needs to know the same information used to form the key to unlock the hidden file. OpenPuff even provides the option of having multiple carriers so uncharacteristically large files can be hidden.