Can graphics files be encrypted?
Of course you can encrypt a graphics file. After all, most encryption algorithms don’t care about the intellectual content of a file. All they chew on is a series of byte values. Therefore, most any encryption program that works on ordinary text files will work on graphics files as well. Why would you want to encrypt a graphics file? Mostly to control who can view its contents. You can invent a proprietary file format and that might slow a file format hack down for, say, five or ten minutes. You could add a proprietary data compression scheme, possibly a twisted variation of an already public algorithm. But there are so many people out there with nothing better to do than hack at unknown data formats that your data would probably be exposed in little time. But suppose we top off all this effort by encrypting the graphics file itself as we would an ordinary text file. Would your data then be safe? Realize that an encrypted graphics file still might not be very secure. For every data enc
