My goal is to write a program (e.g. in Python or C++) which takes as input a JPG file (e.g. tux.jpg) and make tiny changes to it, such that it outputs many different images (maybe a thousand images or even more), but in a way that all these images, while having different hash, look almost the same visually, i.e. the changes should have the least impact to the original image as possible.
I first though to play around with the jpg header but that might not be enough to make the many thousands of different pictures I want. As a naive way, I thought to flip a random bit in the file, but that bit can possibly result in a less than desirable result, which can be seen especially in small pictures (e.g. a dark pixel in the white space in the tux picture). Ideally, I would like to change a random pixel with a "neighboring" color, such that the two resulting pictures have almost no visual difference.
For this purpose, I read the JPG codec example but I find it very confusing and hard to understand. Can someone help me what my program should look for as it parses the file in binary format and how to change a random pixel with a "neighboring" color?
You can change the comment part of the file by playing with the file header. A simple way to do that is to use a ready made open source program that allows you to put the comment of your choice, example HLLO repeated 8 times. That should give you 256 bits to play with. You can then determine the place where the HLLO pattern is located in the file using a hex editor. You then load the data in memory and start changing these 32 bytes and calculate the hash each time to get a collision (a hash that matches)
By the time you find a collision, the universe will have ended.
Although in theory doable, it's practically impossible to crack SHA256 in a reasonable amount of time, standard encryption protocols would be over and hackers would be enjoying their time.
