Steganography in XML Files Using RC4 Stream Encryption Algorithm

Abstract

In this modern era, the importance of information security has gained a special importance. Steganography techniques can be applied to text file, images, a video file or an audio file. This paper gives a new insight that how Private Key Steganography can be used to give an extra-secure method. This paper gives another dimension of safe correspondence through information hiding on Internet. The experimental results show that the proposed method has high security than others. The suggested method is implemented by using Java language. Keywords: Steganography, Cryptography, Security, XML, RC4 Algorithm I.INTRODUCTION Steganography is derived from the Greek words. "stegos" is termed as "roof or covered" and "graphy" as "writing or drawing". Thus Steganography is the hidden writing or secret writing. With the help of this, a secret message can be set inside a piece of information and can be sent without being aware of the secret message. In Steganography unauthorized person will be unaware of the secret data being sent by the end user via any carrier such as web page, video file, audio file or image file. Whereas, in Cryptography the unauthorized person will be aware of the secret data being sent by the end user but since the message will be encrypted by an unknown key (known to only end users), the information cannot be decrypted by him. The multimedia files are only used as the cover medium but not as a transmission medium. Whereas in web page information hiding process, the web pages can serve as both the cover medium and transmission method to conceal the secret information. Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. XML is used to store or transport data, while HTML is used to format and display the same data. Whereas these both languages use tags with certain attributes. In this paper we propose a new approach of information hiding in XML or HTML file by getting the encrypted message by RC4 encryption algorithm using a private key and this obtained message will be used as an id value in XML or HTML id attribute. Unlike existing approaches in web page, information hiding i.e. changing the case of tags which can be done by changing some letters in the tags, this paper is using an id attribute to store the encrypted secret information so that an unintended receiver cannot suspect it as a stego web page. Even if in case unauthorized person suspect, he cannot retrieve the information because of the private key encryption. Few existing web steganography Techniques are In the existing models of the web page information concealing methods the researches have been done to conceal the secret information in the tags and attributes of the source code i.e. HTML and XML files [6] as well as the white spaces of the source code [7][8]. The popular techniques used in the existing model are as listed below: