Information Hiding: A New Approach in Text Steganography

Sending encrypted messages frequently will draw the attention of third parties, i.e. crackers and hackers, perhaps causing attempts to break and reveal the original messages. In a digital world, steganography is introduced to hide the existence of the communication by concealing a secret message inside another unsuspicious message. Steganography is often being used together with cryptography and offers an acceptable amount of privacy and security over the communication channel. This paper presents an overview of text steganography and a brief history of steganography along with various existing text-based steganography techniques. Highlighted are some of the problems inherent in text steganography as well as issues with existing solutions. A new approach is proposed in information hiding using inter-word spacing and inter-paragraph spacing as a hybrid method. Our method offers dynamic generated stego-text with six options of maximum capacity according to the length of the secret message. This paper also analyzed the significant drawbacks of each existing method and how our new approach could be recommended as a solution.

[1]  L. Marvel Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking , 2005 .

[2]  Niels Provos,et al.  Hide and Seek: An Introduction to Steganography , 2003, IEEE Secur. Priv..

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

[4]  L. O'Gorman,et al.  Marking text features of document images to deter illicit dissemination , 1994, Proceedings of the 12th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Vol. 3 - Conference C: Signal Processing (Cat. No.94CH3440-5).

[5]  Marc Rennhard,et al.  A Practical and Effective Approach to Large-Scale Automated Linguistic Steganography , 2001, ISC.

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

[7]  Richard Bergmair,et al.  Towards Linguistic Steganography: A Systematic Investigation of Approaches, Systems, and Issues , 2004 .

[8]  Wang Shuozhong,et al.  Information Hiding in Text Using Typesetting Tools with Stego-Encoding , 2006, First International Conference on Innovative Computing, Information and Control - Volume I (ICICIC'06).

[9]  Birgit Pfitzmann,et al.  Information Hiding Terminology - Results of an Informal Plenary Meeting and Additional Proposals , 1996, Information Hiding.

[10]  Peter Wayner Disappearing cryptography - being and nothingness on the net , 1996 .

[11]  D. L. Parnas,et al.  On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules , 1972, Software Pioneers.

[12]  Lawrence O'Gorman,et al.  Electronic Marking and Identification Techniques to Discourage Document Copying , 1995, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[13]  Sabu M. Thampi Information Hiding Techniques: A Tutorial Review , 2008, ArXiv.

[14]  Stephan Katzenbeisser,et al.  Information Hiding Techniques for Steganography and Digital Watermaking , 1999 .

[15]  Peter Wayner Strong Theoretical Stegnography , 1995, Cryptologia.

[16]  Ross Anderson,et al.  Information hiding terminology , 1996 .

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

[18]  Peter Wayner,et al.  Mimic Functions , 1992, Cryptologia.

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

[20]  Steven H. Low,et al.  Copyright protection for the electronic distribution of text documents , 1999, Proc. IEEE.

[21]  Krista Bennett,et al.  LINGUISTIC STEGANOGRAPHY: SURVEY, ANALYSIS, AND ROBUSTNESS CONCERNS FOR HIDING INFORMATION IN TEXT , 2004 .

[22]  Mark Chapman,et al.  Hiding the Hidden: A software system for concealing ciphertext as innocuous text , 1997, ICICS.