Image on Twitter contains complete works of Shakespeare

Twitter appears to retain icc profiles when uploading an image. A security researcher demonstrated this by integrating Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre into a rar file in a thumbnail showing the famous English playwright and poet.

Security researcher David Buchanan demonstrated the steganography technique in a tweet featuring a small image of Shakespeare. “This Technique Survives Twitter’s Thumbnailer”, he writes. Steganography is the concealment of information in a way that is not noticeable. The unseen integration of extra data into digital images has been happening for a long time, but most techniques do not survive the conversion to a thumbnail.

Buchanan succeeded by dividing an HTML page containing the complete works of Shakespeare into 31 rar files with a size of 64kB each. He then developed a script to convert the rar files into an icc profile. Icc profiles normally contain information that allows printers to provide accurate color reproduction on certain types of paper. The researcher integrated that profile into a jpeg of Shakespeare and published the thumbnail via Twitter.