Structural Text Steganography Using Unseen Tag Attribute Values

Abstract

Apart from an effective steganography scheme, it is vital to have an abundance of cover medium while considering the practicability of a stego-system. Aside from images, document files are one of the most exchanged attached content via electronic mailings. In this paper, we present a structural steganographic scheme based on unseen tag attribute values using office documents as the medium. Specifically, we use the XML file that builds the core of the file documents to vehiculate the message. The secret is not visible within the text content, and the stego file size is not far from the cover size. We are among the first to investigate the unseen tag identifier within the cover document to hide the secret message. We assess the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of the invisibility, embedding capacity, robustness, and security. The performance results show the advantage of a higher capacity embedding and a better flexibility while keeping high practicability in terms of accessibility and implementation.