A Robust and High-Capacity Text Steganography Technique Using Arabic Unicode Standard

Abstract

The need to protect confidential data stored on personal computers (PCs) or sent to other parties has increased significantly in recent years. Therefore, secure, robust, and high-capacity strategies are needed to cover confidential data contained within media and make it difficult to detect. Due to the limited number of research studies that have achieved these ends through text steganography, we present an innovative approach for seamlessly hiding secret bits in Arabic text using Unicode Standard. Our main proposed method uses a contextual form of Arabic characters to hide secret bits. In addition, in three enhancements to the main method we use special characters such as the Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) and Kashida in some cases, and whitespaces and the Zero Width Non-Joiner (ZWNJ) in other enhancements, to further enhance capacity while preserving security. The results of experiments performed on these methods demonstrate that the proposed method with its improvements outperforms similar methods with an average expansion in capacity of more than 50%. It also has a higher security ratio than nearly all methods it is comparable to and is robust against modifications done by third parties such as deletion of Kashida, ZWJ, and spaces. The robustness ratio for modifications that are not discoverable by the receiver is also better in our proposed method than in the four