Steganography Tool

We have completed our non-game app!

CipherSquad has created an app in which the user can upload an image and specify a string of characters, and the app will encode the text into the image to create a hidden message. 

The app will also allow the user to share this encoded image with friends, who can upload the image back into the app and decode the image to reveal the hidden text. The sharing option allows the user to share their image via text message, email, and straight to the decode activity among other things.

We have also implemented an image preview so that once the user has selected an image to encode/decode, the "No Image Selected" box will display a scaled version of the image.

Rat Race! by CipherSquad

We have finally finished the game!  We will be presenting our game in Olin 202 at 2:45PM!  It's been a long time in the making and it turned out well.  We may commit a few more small changes to the code to make things more elegant and such, but all in all, the game is complete.

Future features in addition to the ones already featured may include: AI mice that you race against and Networked mice that represent other players running the game on their phones.

Stay tuned in for a potential release of Version 2.0 that will include these features.  For now, here is Rat Race by CipherSquad!

Rat Race: On to the Finishing Touches!

Since our last blog post we have made a few revisions to our game. We removed the option to choose a maze generation algorithm, so the game now only uses a Recursive Backtracker maze generation algorithm. Before we also had the level up functionality working, but it was a bit extreme. The maze would get considerable larger with each level up; we now have it working so that the size will only increase slightly.

We've also gotten some power-ups working! Currently we have two power-ups: a block of cheese and a sandwich. They are each worth 1000 points.

We've also added a scoreboard which will display the top ten highest scores along with the initials of the player.

In the next week, we will be adding a directions page to explain how the game works, replace the IntroActivity with a splash screen, and add functionality to the settings menu.

Awesome StegoTool icon!

Hello All,

Here is an icon I designed for the Steganography Tool app on a very advanced multi-layered transparency bitmap image editing software (mspaint)!

-Ethan

Steganography Tool Update

So far the app is coming along nicely! We have added in a few bells and whistles to spruce up the overall look and feel of the app along with some added functionality to really make the app a lot of fun. As it stands now we are very very close to being prepared to show the world our creation and as such once we are done you can check out the secret hidden message lodged in this picture!

Also on a side note, as of this past Monday the CipherSquad team has agreed to swap projects among its members so now there will be fresh new eyes looking to make this app better than it already is!

Matt Leja adds some cheese

Hello everyone! Today I pushed some code that finally gave the game some power-ups, which right now just add points to the mouse. As of now the only power up is cheese and there is as many pieces as the level number. So, level 5 has 5 pieces of cheese randomly placed on the map. The cheese will be removed from the map, and be removed from the array it was in.

Next may be adding other power-ups, garbage and bread are in the works and once I have copy write free images, they should be implemented pretty soon.

Also, we are going to add a page after each level, which may display the number of power ups as well as maybe the images of them in a group.

Steganography update

So after a few weeks of fiddling around and a lot stressing about whether or not this app was feasible I am proud to say that as of today I have gotten the application to the stage where it can take an image and text, and combine them so that if you were to look at the image you wouldn't be able to tell the text was even there. The library that we have gone ahead and used for hiding the text is the F5Android library (which is open sourced and free to use). This library is awesome in that it offers a very sneaky way to hide text inside of images that is still considered one of the harder methods of steganography to break. Below is an image that I have processed using our app that contains the text "Augustana CSC 490 Spring 2015" and you can't even tell its there!