Steganography Scavenger Hunt

GenCyber 2020

A photo showing the GUI of a steganography tool called S-Tool

This game was created for the GenCyber 2020 summer camp. The GenCyber 2020 camp was online which completely changed the camp. The camp had activities prepared from previous camps but they couldn't be used since it required the students to be on campus. I pitched the idea of an online scavenger hunt. However, not everyone was on board with it since the base idea had students looking up the answers online and typing them in a document which felt like homework. We had a couple of other activities planned but I was still asked to create and demo the game.

The main issue I had to solve was how to make the game fun. The end goal of this scavenger hunt was for the students to have fun and learn at the same time. As mentioned before, taking information and placing in a document is not fun. Luckily I had all the tools to create a fun educational game. First was using the concept of steganography which involves hiding information in another piece of media or information. For example, hiding a document in an image. Using this concept I decided the main game would use the steganography tool called S-Tool. I decided to use S-Tool because the students already had access to and experience with the tool because of the previous lab. Also, S-Tool had a user interface that would act as an immersive element of the game.

The game worked like this:

  1. The students were given a document with the first question given to them and blanks of how the answer was formatted.
  2. The students were also given a folder of encrypted images.
  3. To get to the next question they had to answer the first/previous question.
  4. The answer would be the password to decrypt the image revealing the next question.
  5. The students would continue to do this until they reached the end.

I created a small demo of the game for the staff of GenCyber and they loved it. Everyone told me it felt like a game, which was the goal! Now it was time to show the students and see if they thought the game was fun. The students' responses were outstanding they loved the game. They tried to even play the game outside of the camp and asked for more questions to answer. I wanted to create more questions for them but the camp came to an end.