Title: A cryptographic data hiding algorithm with high cover text capacity

Authors: Muhammad Azeem; Jingsha He; Khurram Gulzar Rana; Faheem Akhtar

Addresses: Faculty of Information Science and Technology, College of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China ' Faculty of Information Science and Technology, College of Software Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China ' Institute of Information Technology, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan ' Department of Computer Science, Sukkur Institution of Business Administration (SIBA), Sukkur, 65200, Pakistan

Abstract: Cryptography and steganography are foremost techniques used to ensure security and confidentiality of secret information. In steganography, data hiding capacity with security is a great challenge for the researchers. In present scheme, a novel approach with combination of steganography and cryptography is proposed to achieve high data hiding capacity with greater security. To accomplish this goal, three level encryption is applied to hide secret message by using bit complement and bit right rotation. Different Unicode characters such as zero width non-joiner (ZWNJ), zero width joiner (ZWJ) and zero width character (ZWC), are used to conceal secret information into English cover text. To embed secret data into cover text, firstly, algorithm implements three level encryption on confidential data and then resulting binary is embedded into cover text by using Unicode characters. The results revealed that recently designed algorithm has higher data security due to light weight and efficient encryption mechanism along with 2-bit/char cover text capacity. Moreover, there is no overhead of secret key generation and exchange from source to destination. Projected technique is easy to implement, hard to break and reduces intruder's attention.

Keywords: information control; Unicode; cryptography; bit rotation; cover media; text steganography.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2019.098804

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2019 Vol.11 No.2, pp.225 - 244

Received: 11 May 2018
Accepted: 03 Jul 2018
Published online: 02 Apr 2019 *

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