A linguistic steganography framework using Arabic calligraphy

Abstract

In linguistic steganography, languages’ features are employed to hide information. The Arabic language has a rich set of features which have not been utilized until now in this area. In particular, Arabic calligraphy contains multiple fonts and multiple shapes of Arabic alphabet letters. In this paper, a framework that uses Arabic calligraphy to hide information is proposed. The phases of the framework are preparation phase, embedding phase and extraction phase. The embedding phase uses string matching to generate stego text and accompanying letter shapes according to a secret message. The framework also includes corpus creation and a modification of the Aho-Corasick string-matching algorithm. The Arabic font Naskh was used as a case study. A set of Arabic poetry and proverbs were used as a dataset. The framework was evaluated on capacity and security. Because the visual difference between the cover and the stego-cover must be unnoticeable to the human in any stego-system, the security in this framework is satisfying due there is no cover used. The cover represents the secret message itself and it provides high capacity to hide data also. The evaluation showed the potential of using the multiple shapes of Arabic letters to satisfy steganography requirements.