Dual stage text steganography using unicode homoglyphs

Abstract

Text steganography is hiding text in text. A hidden text gets hidden in a cover text to produce a plain looking stego text. This plain looking stego text is posted as the message which no one suspects to contain anything concealed. Today, text messages are a common mode of communication over the internet and it is associated with a huge amount of traffic. Steganography is an added layer of protection that can be used for security and privacy. In this paper, we describe a text steganography approach that provides a good capacity and maintains a high difficulty of decryption. We make use of approaches of space manipulation, linguistic translation and Unicode homoglyphs in our algorithm. Our implementation is in Python. Also, we explain a parallel approach for hiding large hidden text messages in large cover text messages. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.