misoboute / pedastep

Persian Dada Steganographic Poetry

pedastep

Persian Dada Steganographic Poetry utility creates templates to steganographically wrap a Persian piece of text message into a piece of classic Persian poetry.

When steganizing a piece of text, you provide the destination poem rhyme and metre in a metadata file. The metadata file contains a simple JSON object that specifies destination poem rhyme, metre, poem file path, clear text file path, and the intermediate CSV file path. Then invoke the pedastep script like the example below:

$ python3 pedastep.py encrypt metadat/001.json

The encryption part of the utility uses the rhyme as the rotating encryption key. It then uses the metre values to inflate the encrypted message by adding corresponding numbers of spaces between the encrypted letters. This is then written to the intermediate CSV file. The CSV file contains sequences of letters and spaces. You will need to open the CSV file in your editor of choice (LibreOffice Calc, Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers...) and replace the spaces with letters in such a way that it can be recited as a piece of poetry with the same rhyme and metre. Remember that you can only replace the spaces. If you change any of the letters that the encryption step has produced you will change the encrypted message and will not be able to decrypt the original message afterwards from the final poem. The letters in the rhyme plus their two preceding letters do not fill any of the spaces in the CSV file. The rhyme is added where required without being constrained by the letters in the CSV.

You can place the finished piece of poetry in a separate file from the CSV as plain text so that it can be later decrypted using the same utility.

To decrypt a message previously encrypted using pedastep, create a metadata file (the same json object with values for poem file path, metre, rhyme, and clear text file path) and invoke the pedastep script like the example below:

$ python3 pedastep.py decrypt metadata/001.json