A Comparative Analysis of Arabic Text Steganography

Abstract

Protecting sensitive information transmitted via public channels is a significant issue faced by governments, militaries, organizations, and individuals. Steganography protects the secret information by concealing it in a transferred object such as video, audio, image, text, network, or DNA. As text uses low bandwidth, it is commonly used by Internet users in their daily activities, resulting a vast amount of text messages sent daily as social media posts and documents. Accordingly, text is the ideal object to be used in steganography, since hiding a secret message in a text makes it difficult for the attacker to detect the hidden message among the massive text content on the Internet. Language’s characteristics are utilized in text steganography. Despite the richness of the Arabic language in linguistic characteristics, only a few studies have been conducted in Arabic text steganography. To draw further attention to Arabic text steganography prospects, this paper reviews the classifications of these methods from its inception. For analysis, this paper presents a comprehensive study based on the key evaluation criteria (i.e., capacity, invisibility, robustness, and security). It opens new areas for further research based on the trends in this field.

CSNTSteg: Color Spacing Normalization Text Steganography Model to Improve Capacity and Invisibility of Hidden Data

“…However, inserting Unicode characters led to an increase in the stego text size, which can detect by most word editors. Moreover, most Unicode text steganography techniques suffer from low capacity [10]. White-space-based used to hide information in the text by inserting extra space between words and at the end of a line or a paragraph [49][50][51][52][53][54].…”

“…This can be measured by computing the number of used characters in the cover text. The following formula is used to calculate the usage ratio [10,[74][75][76]:…”

“…Compressing the secret message reduces its length, hence increasing the hiding capacity. Current works [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] show that the Huffman coding is a suitable compression technique for a text. Accordingly, it is applied in this study to decrease the size of the secret message.…”

“…One category in structural text steganography is feature-based steganography, which hides the secret information by modifying the text features such as font RGB coding (color), size, style, and character spacing. Increasing the capacity of hidden data while maintaining invisibility is the main concern by the researchers [5,9,10], which is still a challenge in feature-based text steganography techniques still suffer from low capacity and low invisibility. The limited number of bit per embedding location (character) [5,9,11,12], less usable/embeddable character [13][14][15][16], and uncompressing the secret message [13] are the main issues that affects the capacity in feature-based steganography; while the dissimilarity between the cover and stego text in size or appearance causes low invisibility [8,14,15].…”

Coverless Text Information Hiding Based on Built-in Features of Arabic Scripts

“…These format-based techniques can fool humans, but they are unable to fool computer programs or make the stego text longer. Moreover, these techniques exhibit reduced resilience to text retyping attacks which makes it simple to lose the hidden data [11], [12].…”