A new approach to Telugu text steganography

Abstract

The tremendous growth in the use of Internet has led to a continuous improvements in the area of security. The improved security techniques are used to preserve the intellectual property. There are many kinds of security mechanisms. New steganographic methods are proposed to embed secret information into a text cover media to search for new possibilities for employing new languages other than English. Here in this paper the authors propose two new methods using Linguistic steganography. By taking the help of Telugu consonant character modifiers and its punctuation marks authors have developed security mechanisms. These markers can be efficiently used as information carriers to hide information into a cover text. In this paper the authors propose a few text based steganographic methods. The proposed methods work by using the linguistic properties of Telugu language. The first method selects embed position of the secret information in the cover text by using Telugu Ottulu. Based on the two level classification of Ottulu, they are assigned a bit 0 or a bit 1. These symbols embed the secret information in the third character of Telugu cover Text data. It maps a single bit of the data with a Telugu character in the specified manner. The second method uses the Telugu linguistic punctuation marks classification. These punctuation marks are classified using a four level classification. Using a four level classification, these punctuation marks are encoded with a 00, 01, 10 and 11 respectively. Secret information is embedded in a Telugu Text. Whenever the application sees a certain punctuation mark it codes this one as secret information. At the receiving side, corresponding opposite methods are applied to get back the original secret message. To improve it further, the information has been encrypted using various cryptographic methods and then this cipher text can also be embedded in the cover text.