Stegseek is a lightning fast steghide cracker, build as a fork of the original steghide project. As a result it is way faster than other crackers and can run through the entirety of rockyou.txt in under a minute.
Skip ahead to Performance for some raw numbers.
At the moment, Stegseek can only be installed by building from source. The following steps will help you install Stegseek on Ubuntu.
Running the following command will install all required dependencies:
sudo apt install libmhash-dev libmcrypt-dev libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev git autoconf build-essentialFirst, clone this repo by calling:
git clone https://github.com/RickdeJager/stegseek.git
Next, enter the following commands to build and install Stegseek:
cd stegseek
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
sudo make installThe most important command to know about is stegseek --crack:
stegseek --crack -sf [stegofile.jpg] -wl [wordlist.txt]
Use stegseek --help to get the full list of available options:
Stegseek version 0.1
=== Stegseek Help ===
To crack a stegofile;
stegseek --crack -sf [stegofile.jpg] -wl [wordlist.txt]
Cracking options:
-sf, --stegofile select stego file
-wl, --wordlist select the wordlist file
-t, --threads set the number of threads. Defaults to the number of cores.
-v, --verbose display detailed information
-q, --quiet skip performance metrics (slightly increases performance)
Use "stegseek --help -v" to include steghides help.
Stegseek includes nearly all of steghides functionality, so it can also be used to embed or extract data as normal.
This is where Stegseek really shines. As promised, let's start with the "rockyou.txt under a minute 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
time stegseek --crack -sf pic.jpg -wl rockyou.txt
[i] Read the entire wordlist (14344391 words), starting cracker
[ 14344392 / 14344391 ] (100,00%)
[i] --> Found passphrase: " 1"
[i] Original filename: "secret.txt"
[i] Extracting to "pic.jpg.out"
real 0m41,359s
user 5m24,819s
sys 0m0,544s
And there it is, over 14 million passwords in 41 seconds 😍.
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 v0.1 | Stegcracker 2.0.9 | Stegbrute v0.1.1 (-t 8) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "cassandra" | 1 000 | 0.7s | 3.1s | 0.7s |
| "kupal" | 10 000 | 0.7s | 14.4s | 7.1s |
| "sagar" | 100 000 | 1.0s | 2m23.0s | 1m21.9s |
| "budakid1" | 1 000 000 | 3.2s | [p] 23m50.0s | 13m45.7s |
| "␣␣␣␣␣␣␣1" | 14 344 383 | 41.4s | [p] 5h41m52.5s | [p] 3h17m38.0s |
[p] = projected time based on previous results.
To compare the speed of Stegseek, let's look at the speed for the 1 000 000th entries (below this value, initialization still takes too much time to get a measurement). At this scale Stegseek is 400+ times faster than stegcracker and 250+ times faster than Stegbrute.