Title: A novel approach to secret data concealment with high cover text capacity and security

Authors: Muhammad Azeem; Jingsha He; Allah Ditta; Faheem Akhtar; Sher Muhammad Daudpota

Addresses: College of Computer Science and Technology, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, 3+Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China ' Faculty of Information Science and Technology, College of Software Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China ' Division of Science and Technology, University of Education, College Road, Township, Lahore, Pakistan ' College of Software Engineering, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China; Department of Computer Science, Sukkur IBA University, Sukkur, 65200, Pakistan ' Department of Computer Science, Sukkur IBA University, Sukkur, 65200, Pakistan

Abstract: Massive technological advancement and rapid internet growth has made the security of secret data more challenging for security researchers. Though, steganography techniques were also evolved but still require large cover text to conceal large message. Therefore, to deal capacity issue, present research articulates a novel approach to achieve high data concealment capacity of cover text along with security by using combination of steganography and cryptography. Current algorithm applies four-layer encryption on secret message and seven Unicode characters such as invisible plus (IP), invisible separator (IS), inhabit symmetric swapping (ISS), left to right override (LRO), (ZWNJ), zero width joiner (ZWJ), zero width non-joiner and zero width character (ZWC), are employed to embed secret information into English carrier text to generate stego text object. The result reflects tremendous increase of 300% in carrier text capacity and encryption significantly enhances the security of secret information. Moreover, the identical carrier and stego text reduces hacker's attention.

Keywords: Unicode; bit rotation; carrier media; cryptography; text steganography.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2020.103878

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2020 Vol.12 No.1, pp.77 - 98

Received: 25 Jul 2018
Accepted: 25 Sep 2018
Published online: 02 Dec 2019 *

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