Unified Inter-Letter Steganographic Algorithm, A Text-based Data
Hiding Method
Ahmad Esmaeilkhah1,
Changiz Ghobadi1, Javad Nourinia1, and Maryam Majidzadeh2
1Electrical Engineering Department, Urmia University, Iran
2Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical and Vocational University,
Iran
Abstract: This paper funds a novel text-based steganographic algorithm with
enhanced functionality with respect to the previously proposed methods, by
careful selection of one of standard space characters, the introduced
Inter-Letter Steganographic Method, or Visual and Reverse Extraction attacks,
two additional modes of operation have been added to the original InLetSteg
algorithm and have been merged into a single one, called as Unified
Inter-Letter Steganographic Method, or UILS. The Unified Inter-Letter
Steganographic Method (UILS) embeds the data using variable step-size into the
host text and the developed mathematical model can calculate the approximate
length of the host text required to embed certain data, statistically. In
addition, the general mathematical model of UILS makes it customizable to adapt
the real-world applications. The statistical parameters that are used through
this work are calculated for English host text, but are easily calculable for
other languages with similar alphabets and structure of notations. Finally, the
programmatically deployed UILS outputs are experimentally examined using 60
attendant and the results are discussed.
Keywords: Steganography, UILS, InLetSteg, Reverse
extraction attack, Unicode space character, Inter-letter spacing.
Received June 6, 2018; accepted July 21, 2019