Information Hiding: A Generic Approach

Abstract

Problem statement: Privacy and security over communication channels are of primary concerns. Due to their complexity and diversity, there is a need for continuous improvements of the adopted solutions. In this study, we consider two of the adopted ones, namely, steganogrphy and cryptography and propose a new information hiding system. Approach: The proposed system was based on a generic approach that incorporates text-based steganography and cryptography methods in a way that permits their combined or stand alone adoption. Thus, achieving message encryption incorporated with its concealing inside another unsuspicious one. Furthermore, two steganography methods (the inter-word spaces method and syntactic methods) had been combined with a hybrid text-encoding in a form of binary representation of terns rewriting systems. Results: An information hiding system had been implemented. The system offered encrypting and hiding dynamic and static text within a cover-text. The conducted experiments using static texts had shown a non-noticeable increase (0.02%) in the size of their respective stego-texts. For the dynamic texts, cover- texts with a size proportional to the length of the secret messages were needed. Conclusion: A generic model for information hiding with a respective implementation framework had been used as an effective tool to develop a hybrid and scalable steganography system that combined good features from the existing ones.