Efficient security and capacity techniques for Arabic text steganography via engaging Unicode standard encoding

Abstract

Steganography is the science of hiding information messages in groups of irrelevant data possibly of another form. Despite of several Arabic text steganography techniques that have been proposed in the literature, there are only limited number of researches that showed high steganography quality in terms of capacity and security. In this paper, we present a novel approach for hiding the secret bits within Arabic text by engaging Unicode standard. Our methods rely on the use of contextual form of Arabic characters to hide certain secret bits showing interesting feedback. Moreover, extra characters such as Zero-width-Joiner or Zero-width-without-joiner, Kashida, and MMSP, are all also used to further enhance the capacity, while preserving acceptable security. Our testing results show that these proposed techniques outperform most reviewed existing methods to be practical, i.e. in order of both efficiency measures of capacity and security. Moreover, our techniques can be widely adopted due to the use of Unicode, in Arabic as well as Urdu Languages, which is opening the research field for the encoding standards to be utilized differently benefitting the ongoing evolving World’s text writing systems.