Scott Northrop <skyhawk@cpac.washington.edu> writes: < The simplest effective way I know of to hide an executable (such as < readdat.exe) is to have it masquerade as another program, preferably one that < is complex enough to justify its size. (You couldn't hide PGP in cat, but you < could hide it in Mathematica.) You'd want the original program to be something < you compile yourself, like some large X program, or gcc, or emacs. (You can < hide *anything* in emacs. In fact, you can make pgp a hidden *primitive* in < emacs. Hmmmmmm... Or Perl. Hmmmmmmm.....) That way you don't have a file < that differs noticably from your OS release (they might check sizes and < checksums), and you don't want to bother with patching a binary anyway. these are interesting ideas. but it seems to me you can't beat just using a pre-existing popular application for steganography. in other words, choose an algorithm which doesn't require you to create a new program to do the job.