A Review on Text Steganography Techniques

Abstract

There has been a persistent requirement for safeguarding documents and the data they contain, either in printed or electronic form. This is because the fabrication and faking of documents is prevalent globally, resulting in significant losses for individuals, societies, and industrial sectors, in addition to national security. Therefore, individuals are concerned about protecting their work and avoiding these unlawful actions. Different techniques, such as steganography, cryptography, and coding, have been deployed to protect valuable information. Steganography is an appropriate method, in which the user is able to conceal a message inside another message (cover media). Most of the research on steganography utilizes cover media, such as videos, images, and sounds. Notably, text steganography is usually not given priority because of the difficulties in identifying redundant bits in a text file. To embed information within a document, its attributes must be changed. These attributes may be non-displayed characters, spaces, resized fonts, or purposeful misspellings scattered throughout the text. However, this would be detectable by an attacker or other third party because of the minor change in the document. To address this issue, it is necessary to change the document in such a manner that the change would not be visible to the eye, but could still be decoded using a computer. In this paper, an overview of existing research in this area is provided. First, we provide basic information about text steganography and its general procedure. Next, three classes of text steganography are explained: statistical and random generation, format-based methodologies, and linguistics. The techniques related to each class are analyzed, and particularly the manner in which a unique strategy is provided for hiding secret data. Furthermore, we review the existing works in the development of approaches and algorithms related to text steganography; this review is not exhaustive, and covers research published from 2016 to 2021. This paper aims to assist fellow researchers by compiling the current methods, challenges, and future directions in this field.

New Text Steganography Technique based on Multilayer Encoding with Format-Preserving Encryption and Huffman Coding

“…The hiding capacity is a major crucial parameter for analysis of the text steganography algorithm performance. We used the Jaro-Winkler distance, as used in [20], which is a similarity metric for the cover text and stego cover (1) and (2). The similarity metrics were used to calculate how similar two strings were to one another, with (0) indicating a difference and (1) indicating equal matching or imperceptibility of strings.…”

“…Although they have the same goal, steganography and cryptography use different techniques. Steganography, as compared to cryptography, keeps the original data by concealing it in various medium [2] [3].…”

“…In addition, the selection process of the embedding positions of the secret data is performed sequentially. Sequential patterns of the positions make the algorithm vulnerable to attacks [2]. Moreover, text media is *Corresponding Author.…”

Text Steganography Using the Second Quotient Remainder Theorem and Dark Colour Schemes

“…Data communication over the Internet has increased significantly, resulting in high traffic and concerns about the security of transmitted data (Jan, Parah, Hussan, & Malik, 2022;Mahato, Khan, & Yadav, 2017). Moreover, information transmitted over the Internet always catches the attention of intruders, which causes the security of sensitive data (Majeed & Sulaiman, 2021;Maniriho & Ahmad, 2017), and it is a severe problem and needs to be preserved to prevent leakage (Bhat, Prabhu, & Renuka, 2017;Jan et al, 2022;Joseph & Vishnukumar, 2015). Therefore, it is necessary to protect sensitive data so irresponsible parties cannot access it (Pujari & Shinde, 2016).…”

A coverless image steganography based on robust image wavelet hashing

“…The science of concealing and transferring hidden information is known as steganography [1], [2]. It is a set of techniques for concealing information through the use of multimedia data, such as image, text, audio, video, and network [3]- [5]. Beacuse people utilization of images since they are one of the most widely used media, Image steganography has attracted a lot of interest, steganographic communication has a significant technology in the field of information security today [6], [7].…”