Experimenting with the Novel Approaches in Text Steganography
This work addresses the problem of secure hidden information exchange in text files for users needing data protection, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing text-based steganographic methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of text steganography by proposing novel approaches that combine random character sequences and feature coding to hide characters, achieving higher security with lower overhead compared to existing methods.
As is commonly known, the steganographic algorithms employ images, audio, video or text files as the medium to ensure hidden exchange of information between multiple contenders to protect the data from the prying eyes. However, using text as the target medium is relatively difficult as compared to the other target media, because of the lack of available redundant information in a text file. In this paper, in the backdrop of the limitations in the prevalent text based steganographic approaches, we propose simple, yet novel approaches that overcome the same. Our approaches are based on combining the random character sequence and feature coding methods to hide a character. We also analytically evaluate the approaches based on metrics viz. hiding strength, time overhead and memory overhead entailed. As compared to other methods, we believe the approaches proposed impart increased randomness and thus aid higher security at lower overhead.