A Generation-based Text Steganography Method using SQL Queries

Cryptography and Steganography are two techniques commonly used to secure and safely transmit digital data. Nevertheless, they do differ in important ways. In fact, cryptography scrambles data so that they become unreadable by eavesdroppers; while, steganography hides the very existence of data so that they can be transferred unnoticed. Basically, steganography is a technique for hiding data such as messages into another form of data such as images. Currently, many types of steganography are in use; however, there is yet no known steganography application for query languages such as SQL. This paper proposes a new steganography method for textual data. It encodes input text messages into SQL carriers made up of SELECT queries. In effect, the output SQL carrier is dynamically generated out of the input message using a dictionary of words implemented as a hash table and organized into 65 categories, each of which represents a particular character in the language. Generally speaking, every character in the message to hide is mapped to a random word from a corresponding category in the dictionary. Eventually, all input characters are transformed into output words which are then put together to form an SQL query. Experiments conducted, showed how the proposed method can operate on real examples proving the theory behind it. As future work, other types of SQL queries are to be researched including INSERT, DELETE, and UPDATE queries, making the SQL carrier quite puzzling for malicious third parties to recuperate the secret message that it encodes.

[1]  Sushil Jajodia,et al.  Exploring steganography: Seeing the unseen , 1998, Computer.

[2]  Gregory Kipper,et al.  Investigator's Guide to Steganography , 2003 .

[3]  Xin-xin Zhao,et al.  Effective Linguistic Steganography Detection , 2008, 2008 IEEE 8th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology Workshops.

[4]  M. Shirali-Shahreza,et al.  Text Steganography by Changing Words Spelling , 2008, 2008 10th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology.

[5]  Mohammad Hassan Shirali-Shahreza,et al.  A New Synonym Text Steganography , 2008, 2008 International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing.

[6]  M.H. Shirali-Shahreza,et al.  Text Steganography in chat , 2007, 2007 3rd IEEE/IFIP International Conference in Central Asia on Internet.

[7]  Adnan Abdul-Aziz Gutub,et al.  A Novel Arabic Text Steganography Method Using Letter Points and Extensions , 2007 .

[8]  S. Ghosh StegHTML : A message hiding mechanism in HTML tags , 2007 .

[9]  C. J. Date,et al.  A Guide to the SQL Standard: A User's Guide to the Standard Relational Language SQL , 1993 .

[10]  Lawrence O'Gorman,et al.  Document marking and identification using both line and word shifting , 1995, Proceedings of INFOCOM'95.

[11]  Peter Wayner,et al.  Disappearing Cryptography: Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking , 2008 .

[12]  Markus G. Kuhn,et al.  Information hiding-a survey , 1999, Proc. IEEE.

[13]  Eric Cole,et al.  Hiding in Plain Sight: Steganography and the Art of Covert Communication , 2003 .

[14]  Walter Bender,et al.  Techniques for Data Hiding , 1996, IBM Syst. J..

[15]  Mark Stamp,et al.  Information security - principles and practice , 2005 .

[16]  Jeng-Shyang Pan,et al.  Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing , 2008, J. Digit. Inf. Manag..

[17]  Jessica Fridrich,et al.  Steganography in Digital Media: References , 2009 .

[18]  C. J. Date A Guide to the SQL Standard , 1987 .

[19]  Larry R. Nyhoff ADTs, Data Structures, and Problem Solving with C++ (2nd Edition) (Alan R. Apt Books) , 2004 .