Welcome to The Codex

A cybersecurity and software development blog by Ethan Hulse. Exploring steganography, offensive security, and practical projects.

DeSteGo: From Hackathon Inspiration to Steganography Analysis Nightmare

HackUSU is a 24-hour hackathon hosted annually at Utah State University. The event spans multiple categories — including game development, AI/ML, and my personal favorite: cyber. This year, I teamed up with three fellow students to build a proof-of-concept command-and-control (C2) and remote-access tool (RAT) that combined steganography and encryption to hide malicious traffic in plain sight. Offensive projects very rarely claim the podium at hackathons, but our aim was to learn and experiment rather than compete for a win. Plus it was 4 full meals for a $15 registration fee, hard to say no to as a college student. ...

March 14, 2025 · 4 min · 763 words · Ethan Hulse

steGO: A Simple Steganography Tool in Go

steGO is a Go-based tool that I wrote for implementing basic steganography, the practice of hiding data within images. This project demonstrates how to encode and decode messages in PNG images using the least significant bit (LSB) technique. Features Encode text messages into PNG images Decode hidden messages from PNG images Support for custom LSB bit manipulation Lightweight and easy to use Installation To install steGO, either: Download the relevant binary from the GitHub releases page, make it executable and run via a CLI Clone the repository and build the project: git clone https://github.com/thvl3/steGO.git cd steGO go build Usage Encoding and Decoding To encode a message into an image: ...

March 14, 2025 · 3 min · 553 words · Ethan Hulse