A Novel Text Steganographic Technique Using Specific Alphabets

Abstract

In today’s electronic era, wealth of electronic information are being accessed over the Internet. Several important information and private data transferring over the Internet are being hacked by attackers via latest communication technologies and as such, maintaining the security of secret data has been a great challenge. To tackle the security issue, cryptographic methods as well as steganographic techniques are essential. This paper focuses on hybrid security system using cryptographic algorithm and text steganographic technique to achieve a more robust security system. In this work, to overcome the limited data hiding capacity, suspiciousness, and data damaging effect due to modification of traditional steganographic techniques, a new technique for information hiding in text file is proposed. The proposed approach conceals a message, without degrading cover, by using the first, second, second last, and last letter of words of the cover text. Hence, from the embedding capacity point of view, its capacity depends on the similarity of characters of the words in cover text. In addition, as a further improvement for security, secret message encryption is performed using the Blowfish algorithm before hiding into the innocuous cover text.