I built a steganography app that embeds encrypted messages into images.

It lives here: https://stegg.alifeinbinary.com

It's as much of an art project as it is a programming project. The images that it generates are visual representations of binary code translated from the text you enter. If you enable encryption it converts it to a hash. You can download the image, send to someone along with the password and they'll be able to decrypt it by uploading it to the app. Or you can post it to the time line and send them the link. All messages are truly private. No raw text text is sent to the server.

It's not vibe coded, I made it with typescript React. The app has a link to the github repo if you want to look under the hood.

The "as much of an art project, as an applied cryptography exercise" take resonates a lot!

Just earlier this week I've released https://github.com/kirushik/paternoster (and even won Berlin Hack and Tell with it) — and it totally came from the idea "in that state-enforced Max messenger there so much surveillance you can only praise the authorities and pray in there. What if there was a way to hide messages into the text of Church Slavonic prayers?"

I've even added TTS (where supported) to it, just for the giggles of getting the "TRUMP" dictionary thorough it.

It's still a pretty solid X25519+AES-GCM encrypted messaging design under the hood, and I'm happy with it — but it still a bit of an afterthough tbh...

Steganography is (hopefully invisibly) hiding information in an image, not creating an image that so obviously encodes information.