Deploying and Evaluating BEACONSAFE: A Step-by-Step Protocol for an Anonymous Whistleblowing Platform with Steganography, Onion Routing, Blockchain Anchoring and Deepfake Detection v1

BEACONSAFE is an anonymous whistleblowing platform that combines anonymous credentials, a SOCKS5 proxy chained through the Tor network, encrypted least-significant-bit (LSB) steganography, blockchain anchoring of evidence digests through six smart contracts, and a convolutional detector of AI-generated images. This protocol gives a complete, step-by-step procedure for building the platform from its source code, running every layer on a single workstation, deploying the same stack to a cloud server, exercising the full reporting workflow, and repeating every measurement reported in the platform’s evaluation. The evaluation steps cover steganographic quality and capacity, detectability under four attacker models, cryptographic cost, the latency added by onion routing, smart contract gas in the test suite and on a deployed chain, detector inference cost and error analysis, and platform behaviour under load. Each step states the command to run and the result to expect, and the protocol closes with reference values and the problems most often met in practice. The design of the platform, its training corpus, its usability and its measured performance are reported in the accompanying publications cited in the Guidelines.