snapWONDERS Vaultify hides a file inside a photo or a video. The result still opens as an ordinary picture, still looks like the picture it was, and carries whatever you put inside it.
That sentence tends to prompt one of two reactions — "why would anyone need that?" or "isn't that just encryption?" Both are fair, so this is an attempt to answer them properly.
What it is for
Staying private. Encryption hides the contents of a message. It does not hide that a message exists. There are situations where the existence of the exchange is the sensitive part — and a photograph that looks like a photograph attracts no attention at all.
Tracing leaks. If several copies of a document go out and each carries something slightly different inside it, a copy that surfaces somewhere it should not can be traced to the one that leaked. The recipients need not know, and the copies are visually identical.
Communicating where communication is watched. Some people work in places where the fact of contact is itself the risk. This is the case we think about most, and the reason Vaultify is on Tor and I2P rather than clearnet alone.
What it is not
It is not a replacement for encryption. Concealment and encryption solve different halves of the same problem, and the sensible position is to use both — hide the fact, encrypt the contents.
It is not magic, either. A file hidden inside a photograph is still subject to what happens to that photograph. Send it through a service that re-compresses images and the carrier survives while its contents may not. That is a property of steganography generally, not a shortcoming we are apologising for, and it is why Vaultify tells you what happened rather than leaving you to discover it later.
How it fits with the rest of the platform
There is a symmetry to snapWONDERS that is easy to miss. Analysis exists to reveal what a file is carrying that you did not know about — metadata, thumbnails, location, tracking markers. Vaultify exists to put something inside a file deliberately.
The same expertise underlies both. You cannot hide something well in a format you do not thoroughly understand, and the years spent taking image formats apart for the analysis side are precisely what make the concealment side work. The two halves are the same knowledge, pointed in opposite directions.
That is also why we are careful about what we publish. We will describe what Vaultify does and what it is for; we will not publish the specifics of how the concealment works, because doing so would help exactly the people our users are trying to avoid.
Where to start
Vaultify is free, needs no account, and works on the clearnet, Tor and I2P. You can hide a file or reveal one now.
If you want the longer version of why any of this exists, our story covers it.
