An Analysis of Alphabet-based Techniques in Text Steganography

Abstract

Steganography and cryptography are methods in information hiding. Cryptography scrambles the secret message, whereas steganography conceals a secret message in a carrier medium. An audio, video, image, and text can be used as a cover medium for hiding messages in steganography. The final output of steganography is a stego object that is sent to a receiver using a stego key. Suspiciousness of a generated stego text will encourage eavesdroppers to reveal the hidden message from stego text. Having reviewed substitution, injection, and propagation techniques for steganography, this paper discovers that there is a suspicion in the generated stego text. It is also discovered that text steganography using Genetic Algorithm (GA) is less focused by researchers compared to image and audio. Accordingly, this paper proposes that the adoption of GA should be focused in future works to protect stego text from suspiciousness due to the effectiveness and efficiency used in other media. Suspiciousness against stego text is very important in steganography to avoid third parties detecting the existence of secret message.