Hide45: A Method for Optimal Payload Data Hiding in Base45 Encoded Strings

Abstract

Base45 encodes pairs of octets using 3 characters from an alphabet of 45 printable symbols. Previous works showed the ability to hide payload data into encoded strings by exploiting the unused configurations of the Base45 encoding. In this paper, we present Hide45, an algorithm for hiding data into Base45 encoded strings that optimizes the embedding capacity, according to the frequency distribution of the input data. Experimental tests show that an optimal assignment of bit configurations to the most frequent pairs of octets allows to reach a payload capacity very close to the theoretical capacity of the method, improving over a baseline assignment by up to 53%.