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This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Christopher Intagliata. Got a minute?

"There’s one message waiting for you."

Imagine that you wanna send a secret message to your colleague at the CIA. You can encrypt it to prevent counterspies from reading it, but they'll still know you were sending some sort of message. There's a better option—steganography—which means "hidden writing." You tuck your secret away in an unexpected place, like an MP3 or a photo file, to conceal¹ the fact you even shared any information at all.

"Transfer of data is complete."

But you can't hide much in those file types without it being suspiciously large. Executable files, aka applications, on the other hand, come in all sizes—making them an ideal place to embed² lots of data, so two computer scientists created an algorithm that packages your encrypted data into an executable file of your choice. Then it spits out a new program that works just like the original—except that your secret cargo³ is inside. The research is in the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions.

Ideally, this handy trick would keep your data safe from prying⁴ eyes until somebody notices that you're sharing an inordinate⁵ number of executable files.

"Transfer complete."

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Christopher Intagliata.