s-Note was born out of passion. At the end of 2010, a friend, Paolo P, at Christmas gave me J. Fridrich’s book Steganography in the digital media, just printed.
After reading the book, actually only the first part, I decided to try to build a small application that would allow people to hide their personal documents in an image. For years the work led me to propose technological solutions to complex problems, manage application development groups, govern corporate information systems. I had never created an application myself from A to Z before.
In my spare time, from 2010 to 2013, I implemented i-Doc a portable-app for usb sticks: it was fashionable at that time. The application used the basic LSB steganography algorithm the works on bitmap images. I showed it to the owner of the company I worked in, who said he was surprised!
My research interests, and some personal problem, led me back, on my weekends, to the real-time systems book and papers, and to the Dolomite.
Later, in 2016, surfing the Internet, I discovered the work of the Independent JPEG Group, and its ijp library: it was robust, complete, fast as complex, and still alive today! Among the numerous functionalities, it allowed managing the JPEG coefficients of the discrete cosine transform. The temptation was strong. I come back to the steganography and I implemented the modified version of the F5 algorithm as a micro-extension of the ijp library. The s-Note kernel was ready.
As the kernel was built with the Apple’s XCode development tool, I told myself that I could dare more: embed the modified F5 on an app and publish it to the Apple Store in order to allow people to hide their private information in an image … an app of my own!
Here I’m. And here ends this fascinating experience that led me to “get my hands in the engine and dirty them with the oil of the bits” of the most modern information technologies.
Then … never say never 🙂