Combining Invisible Unicode Characters To Hide Information In A Text Document

Abstract

Steganography develops tools and methods for hiding the fact of message transmission. The first traces of steganographic methods are lost in ancient times. For example, there is a known method of hiding a written message: the slave's head was shaved, a message was written on the scalp, and after the hair grew back, the slave was sent to the addressee. From detective works, various methods of secret writing between the lines of ordinary text are well known: from milk to complex chemical reagents with subsequent processing. Digital steganography is based on hiding or embedding additional information in digital objects while causing some distortion of these objects. In this case, text, images, audio, video, network packets, and so on can be used as objects or containers. To embed a secret message, steganographic methods rely on redundant container information or properties that the human perception system cannot distinguish. Recently, there has been a lot of research in the field of hiding information in a text container, since many organizations widely use text documents. Based on this, here the MS Word document is considered as a medium of information. MS Word documents have different parameters, and by changing these parameters or properties, you can achieve data embedding. In the same article, we present steganography using invisible Unicode characters of the Space type, but with a different encoding.