A Comparative Analysis of Arabic Text Steganography

Reema Thabit,Nur Izura Udzir,Aziah Asmawi,Roshidi Din,Nuur Alifah Roslan,Sharifah Md Yasin

doi:10.3390/app11156851

Reema Thabit, Nur Izura Udzir + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/app11156851

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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.

Highlights

The rapid expansion of Internet technologies enables flow of vast amounts of information across the public channel with risks of attacks
This affects the text steganography method’s security, especially when its security depends on properties such as invisibility and robustness
This paper presents the evaluation of Arabic text steganography methods based on the capacity, security, robustness, and invisibility criteria in Tables 20–26 and summarized below:

Summary

Introduction

The rapid expansion of Internet technologies enables flow of vast amounts of information across the public channel with risks of attacks Under those circumstances, securing sensitive information has become a serious issue for by governments, organizations, and individuals due to the risk of attack (Different techniques for hiding the text information using text steganography [1,2]). To address this challenge, researchers have proposed various methods to protect secure messages transmitted via public and private communication channels. Invisibility is the fundamental difference between cryptography and information hiding [4]

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