The ISC International Journal of Information Security

Abstract Preserving data confidentiality is crucial in today’s digital world where data exchange is increasingly becoming digital. This paper presents a novel text steganography algorithm. Initially, the secret message is converted into a bit stream. This bit stream is then shuffled using a random sequence to enhance security. Finally, the data is converted into a specific ”time” (including date and hour), and this generated time is embedded within a suitable cover text. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is robust against a variety of attacks, including retyping, OCR, printing and photocopying, compression, document feature modification, non-Unicode environment conversion, and semantic paraphrasing. The algorithm is language-independent and applicable to all languages. The scheme exhibits high transparency against visual and machine attacks and has a capacity of 18 bits per time. The embedding of information bits using a random sequence enhances the scheme’s resistance against detection attacks.

Abstract Steganography is the ability to hide secret information in a cover-media such as sound, pictures and text. A new approach is proposed to hide a secret into Arabic text cover media using "Kashida", an Arabic extension character. The proposed approach is an attempt to maximize the use of "Kashida" to hide more information in Arabic text cover-media. To approach this, some algorithms have been designed and implemented in a system, called MSCUKAT (Maximizing Steganography Capacity Using "Kashida" in Arabic Text). The improvements of this attempt include increasing the capacity of cover media to hide more secret information, reducing the file size increase after hiding the secret and enhancing the security of the encoded cover media. This proposed work has been tested outperforming previous work showing promising results.