Does this replace binwalk and zsteg?

For the CTF-shaped cases, largely yes - and without installing anything. For deep firmware carving, binwalk remains the better tool; ctfpal targets the breadth of techniques a challenge might use rather than the depth of any one of them.

All tools

SteganographyRuns locallyNo account

Automatic steganography solver

Throw every applicable steganography technique at a file at once - image, audio, archive, text, and document - recursively unpack what falls out, and surface flag matches.

Open in ctfpal

Steganography is the category where the tooling problem is worst. The conventional workflow is a dozen separate programs - zsteg, steghide, stegsolve, binwalk, foremost, outguess, exiftool - each with its own install and its own output format, run one after another in the hope that one of them hits.

What runs, and in parallel

Image - LSB sweeps across every channel and bit order, bit-plane extraction, channel splitting, colour-map tricks, OpenStego with a password wordlist.
Audio - WAV LSB extraction, spectrogram rendering, SSTV decoding.
Archive - embedded ZIP discovery, password guessing, gzip and xz unwrapping.
Text - zero-width Unicode, trailing whitespace, homoglyph substitution.
Document - PDF object extraction, Office macro and stream extraction.

The recursive part is what matters

Real stego challenges nest. An image contains a ZIP, which contains a text file, which is Base64, which decodes to another image. Running one tool gives you a layer; ctfpal takes every artefact that falls out and feeds it back through the whole battery, running every text result through decoder cascades, until nothing new appears. That recursion is the difference between solving in one action and solving in six.

Common questions

Does this replace binwalk and zsteg?: For the CTF-shaped cases, largely yes - and without installing anything. For deep firmware carving, binwalk remains the better tool; ctfpal targets the breadth of techniques a challenge might use rather than the depth of any one of them.

Part of a module

8. Steganography

Sweep an image, audio file, or paragraph for hidden data across the whole technique space rather than guessing one method.

Practise on real challenges

Go deeper

A workflow for image steganography, from magic bytes to bit planesStego challenges reward order, not inspiration. The sequence that finds the payload: container checks before pixel checks, structure before statistics, and the specific tells that separate a PNG trick from a JPEG one.