Text steganography in webometrics

Abstract

In the age of technology and science advancement, even powerful governments are not immune from hackers and spies’ influence. Their most important and sensitive information is always being heard and subject to disclosure. Steganography is one of the main ways to improve security and data protection when transferring data over the Web. Steganography’s primary purpose is to convey messages in communication channels through text, image, audio, and video. From the above media, the text files usually use less memory for storage. Text-based steganography methods can be used in Web page texts and plain texts. In Web, the possibility of broadcasting texts (e.g., HTML codes and Hashtags in Social networks) with and without hidden information is the same. It means that the provided steganography system has high security and a Web pages’ viewer cannot realize what hidden information has been transmitted. To hide text, one can refer to the various methods, such as blank space, feature repetition, and the arrangement of elements on Web pages. In these methods, the secret message is hidden using the Web pages’ properties in the code or in the content. In this research, to increase the security of Persian messages transmitting on the networks, some text steganography methods are proposed. Experiments show the performance of the proposed methods.