Week 12: Steganography and Hidden Data

This week asks a new question:

What if the information is not encrypted, but hidden inside another artifact?

Garden State Cyber I introduces steganography, metadata, hex editors, and classroom-safe extraction tools so students can inspect files beyond what a normal preview shows.

This week

Lesson 1: Steganography: Hide the Message, Not the Meaning

Separate concealment from confidentiality. Model payloads, carrier files, metadata, file-size clues, and evidence-based hypotheses.

Lesson 2: Hex Editor Investigation: Read the File Beneath the Preview

Inspect teacher-provided byte views, offsets, file structure, readable strings, metadata, and extension mismatches without executing unknown content.

Lesson 3: Steganography CTF: Find the Hidden Evidence

Use supplied metadata, byte views, approved stego extraction, file-structure inspection, and CyberChef-style decoding to recover synthetic flags and document the complete evidence path.

What you will produce

• steganography-versus-encryption diagram
• metadata evidence table
• byte-level artifact analysis
• four CTF investigation records
• layered transformation ledger
• false-positive analysis

The standard is:

Hidden data is a hypothesis until the artifact and extraction evidence prove it.