A semantic approach to text steganography in sanskrit using numerical encoding

Abstract

Steganography is the art of hiding a message within another so that the presence of the hidden message is indiscernible. People who are not intended to be the recipients of the message should not even suspect that a hidden message exists. Text steganography is challenging as it is difficult to hide data in text without affecting the semantics. Retention of the semantics in the generated stego-text is crucial to minimize suspicion.This paper proposes a technique for text steganography using classical language Sanskrit. As Sanskrit is morphologically rich with a very large vocabulary, it is possible to modify the cover text without affecting the semantics. In addition numerical encoding is used to map a Sanskrit character to a numerical value. This helps in hiding the message effectively. Moreover, in this technique, a key is used for additional security. The key is generated dynamically and is appended to the final message to further add security to the proposed method. The proposed method generated stego-texts with syntactic correctness of 96.7%, semantic correctness of 86.6%, and with a suspicion factor of just 23.4% upon evaluation. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019