Aperi'Solve Wiki
Welcome to the Aperi'Solve wiki — a practical, organized handbook for steganography and CTF forensics. Upload an image on the home page and every analyzer runs automatically; these pages explain the techniques behind the results, how to reproduce them by hand, and how to work through a challenge methodically.
The wiki is built like a field manual: start with a method, jump to a decision tree when you are stuck, dive into a medium-specific technique page, and open a tool's guide when you need the exact command.
How this wiki is organized
- Methodology — the triage workflow: what to run first, second and third on any file, and the rules that save the most time.
- Cheatsheet — a decision tree by file type, a Tell → Tool lookup table, and a "when stuck" checklist. This is the page to keep open during a CTF.
- Techniques — one page per medium, covering how data is hidden and how to recover it: Images · Audio · Text & Unicode · Files & Archives · Steganalysis.
- Tools — a reference page for every analyzer Aperi'Solve runs: what it does, the exact command, how to read the output, and how to install it locally.
Start here
New to steganography challenges? Read the methodology once, then drive every challenge from the cheatsheet. New to Aperi'Solve itself? See getting started.
Tool reference
Each analyzer that runs on your upload has its own page:
- Bit-plane decomposer — visualize each bit of each color channel.
- Color remapping — reveal hidden data with palette transforms.
- zsteg — LSB steganography detection for PNG and BMP.
- steghide — extract data hidden in JPEG/BMP with a passphrase.
- stegseek — crack a steghide passphrase in seconds.
- binwalk — find and extract files embedded inside the image.
- foremost — carve embedded files out of the image.
- exiftool — read metadata (EXIF, XMP, IPTC...).
- pngcheck — verify PNG structure and find corrupt chunks.
- PCRT — detect and repair corrupted PNG files.
- OutGuess — extract hidden data from JPEG images.
- jsteg — extract LSB data from JPEG DCT coefficients.
- JPHide/JPSeek — extract JPHide payloads from JPEG.
- OpenStego — extract randomized LSB steganography.
- stegsnow — hide/extract data in whitespace.
- identify — inspect image properties with ImageMagick.
- file — identify the real file type of an upload.
- strings — find readable text inside files.
Contributions are welcome on GitHub.
What is steganography analysis?
Steganography hides data inside an innocuous carrier file — for images this means manipulating pixel bits, palette entries, metadata fields or the file structure itself. Steganalysis is the practice of detecting and extracting that hidden data. No single tool covers every technique, which is why Aperi'Solve runs a whole battery of analyzers side by side and lets you compare their outputs at a glance — and why this wiki teaches the manual techniques the automated tools do not cover.