Text Steganography Approaches Using Similarity of English Font Styles

Abstract

Data protection has become a more critical issue and the necessity to secure a transmission channel is become more serious. Therefore, steganography, the art of hidden data into a digital media in a way that embed a secret message in the cover document without permitting anyone to suspect the data existence except the intended recipient, has become a relevant topic of research. The actual challenge in steganography is how it could obtain high robustness and capacity without damaging the cover document imperceptibility. This article presents two steganography approaches that based on the Similarity of English Font Styles (SEFS). This process has the main document font style replaced by a similar font style to embed the secret message after encoding it. This is done by using 1) the upper-case letters and punctuation marks of the carrier document or 2) the white space between words, start and end letters of each word that has more than 2 letters in the carrier document. These approaches are tested by being applied to various document formats with various font styles. From the findings, the secret message was vague to an antagonist and the stego-document size was increased and the capacity is very high. Also, the approaches are implemented using C# to develop a tool that hides a critical data in text document and the same findings were achieved.