2016 Second International Conference on Computational Intelligence & Communication Technology

Analysis of Different Text Steganography Techniques

: A Survey
1
Shivani Sharma, 2 Dr. Avadhesh Gupta, 3 Munesh Chandra Trivedi, 4 Virendra Kumar Yadav
1, 3, 4
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
1, 3, 4
ABES Engineering College, 2Institute of Management Studies
1, 2, 3, 4
Ghaziabad, India
1
shivanisharma028@gmail.com, avadhesh.gupta@imsgzb.com, 3muneshtrivedi@gmail.com, 4virendra.yadav@abes.ac.in
2

Abstract—Steganography is helping individual to send
confidential data between two parties. It enables user to hide data
in different digital mediums. Steganography is of many types
such as image steganography, text steganography, audio/video
steganography etc. Text Steganography is quite difficult than
other techniques because of less amount of redundancy and
changes can be detected quite easily. Some of the techniques of
text steganography has been discussed along with characteristics
and working.
Keywords—linguistic; steganography; cryptography; statistical;
metamorphic.
While designing a secure steganographic system, following
points were considered: (i) System is single, practical, stand
alone should meet user requirement of confidentiality,
authenticity and integrity (ii) User should be provided by a
covert channel to hide secret communication, (iii) Based on
the technical and physical requirements user should be able to
have a balanced parameter selection option [3].
Before implementing any steganographic technique both
sender and receiver must agreed on a mutual key exchange
mechanism. There are several text steganography techniques,
some of them are discussed in this paper.

I. INTRODUCTION
Information is an important asset of mankind, whose security is
an essential concern. Risk increases if working on real time
systems which include banking system, railways, flights etc.
Chances of attack increases when we transmit data via internet.
Several types of attacks are possible such as eavesdropping,
man in the middle attack, phishing attack, denial of service etc.
So to secure our data, we are left with three main solutions
which are by using a private dedicated channel, cryptography
and steganography. Private dedicated is time consuming and
user is restricted to a physical point. Cryptography moulds the
message in some other form. Duo of cryptography and
steganography can also be used which are known as
metamorphic cryptography [1].
A. Steganography
Steganography is an art of hiding data inside any digital
medium like audio, image, video, text, protocol etc
[2].Frequent terms used in steganography are:
1) Cover Object: Text, audio, video, image used for embedding
data is known as cover object. It is also known as vessel object.
2) Secret data/message: The data which is to be embedded in a
cover object is known as secret message.
3) Stego Object: It is the resultant output obtained after
embedding which is known as stego object.
B. Text Steganography
Text steganography is broadly divided into following three
categories [4] such as: (i) Format Based Methods - In this
method text data is embedded in the cover text by changing
the formatting of the cover text. This can be done by resizing
the font size, inserting spaces between words, non-displayed
characters (ii) Linguistic Methods: Linguistic analysis is done
in this method (iii) Random and Statistical generation method:
Comparison is not done with the known plain text and most
stenographers generates their own cover texts.
Text Steganography is the most difficult kind of
steganography because a text file lacks a large scale
redundancy of information in comparison to other digital
medium like image, audio and video [5]. The structure of the
text document remain same throughout i.e. text document file
is transparent during saving, written and retrieval phase. While
embedding data in a text file, the main concern is its structure,
which should not change. If the structure is changed, whole
meaning of the text file changes while in other digital mediums
changes can be done easily without making any notable change
in the concerned output. Many languages are used to hide data
like Persian, Arabic [6], Hindi, English etc. English Language
possess some characteristics such as, inflexion, use of
periphrases and fixed word order. Inflexion means that with
minimum change of shape, the relationship of words into a
sentence can be indicated. Periphrases enable to express
something in different ways. In fixed order, the relationship of
a Ease of Use.

978-1-5090-0210-8/16 $31.00 © 2016 IEEE 130

DOI 10.1109/CICT.2016.34
 II. RELATED WORK 3) Change Of Spelling
In [13] author has used this method to embed secret data in a
Text steganography methods are broadly classified into two
text file. They presented a method to exploit same words
groups:
which are spelled differently in American and British English
in order to hide secret message bits. The method which
A) Changing the format of the text: The format of the text file
changes the format of the text can hide large amount of data.
is altered in this method.
Table below shows some words that have different spellings in
UK and US.
B) Changing the meaning of the text: The main focus of this
method is to change the meaning of the text. Table 3. Word Spelling method

There are limited methods based on changing the meaning of American English British English
the text. So our main focus is to describe the working of Airplane Aeroplane
changing the format of the text.Some of the methods are Fiscal Financial
described below. Unalike Unlike
A. Changing the Format of the Text
1) Semantic Method 4) Open Spaces Or White Spaces

Semantic stands for meaning of something also known as This method works by inserting spaces in a cover text file. The
synonym of a certain word. This method hides data by using methodology of this technique is, if one space is inserted
synonym of a word. Synonym substitution may hide single bit inside cover text then hidden bit is ‘0’, while two consecutive
or multiple bit of secret information. In case of retyping or spaces represents ‘1’ at the end of the sentence or vice versa.
OCR programs this method provides protection of White spaces can be inserted at the end of line, paragraph or
information. Sometimes meaning of the text is altered by between words or sentences. The inserted white space does
using this method [7][8][9]. M. Hassan Shirali-Shahreza [9] not create any suspicion in the mind of steganalyst. There are
have used semantic method for embedding secret message in a some text editor programs which automatically delete extra
text file. space while doing formatting because of that hidden
information is destroyed [8]. Inserting white spaces between
Table 1. Semantic method HTML tags does not affect viewing the source or visibility of
the web content. The drawback of this technique is due to
WORD SYNONYM insertion of spaces size of the text file increases and a little
Lazy Idle amount of data can be hidden.
Hard Difficult
Unhappy Sad 5) Format Based Text Steganography Method
Sangita Roy et. al [14] proposes a novel approach of format
based text steganography by using the combination of two
2) Text Abbreviation or Acronym popular text steganography methods word shifting and line
Abbreviations and acronym are used for hiding data. The shifting methods along with copy protection technique with
high capacity of the cover object. By using the above methods,
target word is replaced by its acronym like as soon as possible
this approach embeds data in binary form rather than character
is replaced by ASAP etc. This technique is mostly used in
format. More than one bit is embedded in each line of cover
SMS, social networking applications and sites. Mohammad text so this method has good hiding capacity and this method
Sirali-Shahreza and M.Hassan Shirali Shahreza from Iran have posse less distortion in the cover text. This method is hybrid as
used this technique in [10]. Less data can be hidden in a file of it fuses two methods (Line shifting and word shifting) and uses
several kilobytes [7][11] by using this method. This method a special character for performing text steganography.
can also be used to reduce the size of the secret data text file
[12] and then steganography is applied by using some other a) Encoding Procedure: Secret message and cover object is
method. taken as input and then encoding is applied. The secret
message bit is counted to check whether it is even or odd. If the
Table 2. Abbreviation or acronym method no. of bits is odd then “0” is added to the left, otherwise no
change. Then the secret message is divided into no. of blocks,
ACRONYM WORD each of 2 bits size. The no. of blocks is stored into an array.
ID Identification Embedding is done by finding next embedding position in a
block. These four cases arise while embedding secret message:
DOB Date Of Birth
ASAP As Soon As Possible (i) If block[i] = ‘00’, then line shifting method is applied. Go
to the end of line and shrink procedure is called, which will
shrink the font size of the line.

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(ii) If block[i] = ‘11’, go to the end of line and expand
procedure is called, which will expand the font size of the line.
(iii) If block[i] = ‘01’, embed ‘0’, use two spaces instead
of one space between two words.
(iv) If block[i] = ‘10’, embed ‘1’, use an extra space
before any special character. If no special character is there,
add one special character to embed ‘1’.
Same procedure is applied on other block and the resultant
is stego text. This method is robust and with respect to the
existing algorithm, a large amount of data can be hidden. It
requires maximum of four inter spaces. The requirement can be
further reduced by using combination of ‘00’ and ‘11’ bits.
This algorithm is best for centrally aligned messages, better in
right and left justified and worst in justified.
b) Decoding Procedure: The stego text is stored in an array
and scanning of stego text is done by using ORC software.
Then all the spaces will be used for extraction purpose. Four
cases arise while extraction:
(i) If two spaces occur simultaneously, then extract ‘01’.
(ii)If a special character is present after a space in the stego
text, then extract ‘10’.
(iii)If line size is less than standard line size, then extract
‘00’.
(iv)If line size is greater than standard line size, then extract
‘11’.
All the extracted bits are combined into an array. Resultant
is the secret message. In this method secret text is compressed
and then embedded by using proposed algorithm. This
technique encodes ‘0’ by using single space and ‘1’ by using
two spaces. This method is fully dependent on the format
(structure) of the text and can be used for preventing illegal
duplication and distribution of text especially electronic data. It
has a major disadvantage as many word processing software
remove spaces from the text file, which destroys secret
message. This method can also be applied to hard copy
documents. The time complexity of the proposed method is O
(n2) whereas the time complexity existing algorithm is O (n).
6) HTML Tags
HTML Tags finetune their effects by using attributes which
can be in any order.Steganography can be performed by using
this ordering.In [15] author has used the idea of hiding secret
message by using convention of these attributes.They had
developed a text steganographic technique in HTML using
attribute reordering. This reordering does not add or remove
any content in the files.While using HTML files ceratin
constraints should be taken care of so that the secret message
should remain undetectable like size of the HTML file should
not be modified and its display should not be effectd either in
plain text formant or in web browser.Disadvantage of using
HTML is lack of redundant bits.Size of the HTML file is
directly proportional to the message size. The author has used
HTMLTidy [16] as the HTML parser for implementing
steganography [13] which is used for cleaning HTML files and
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also make sure that all the HTML tags are closed
properly.There are sevral approaches to hide data like table
Driven Approach, Lexicographic Approach etc.Table driven
approach is applied to tags having two or more attributes. One
attributes is used as the key and the other is secondary. A
database is created for pairing key and secondary value.
Lexicographic approach is more efficient than table driven
approach as the latter can encode at most n/2 bits of
information where n is the number of attributes associated
with the tag.Lexicographic approach can hide n-1 bits of
information which is almost twice as that of table driven
approach.
Table 4. Lexicographical vs. Table Driven HTML Tags in different websites
7) XML Document
XML is an acronym of Extensible Mark-up Language
(XML).It is a platform independent language which is
universal in nature. It is mainly used for storing, exchanging
and transferring information electronically.XML documents
are light weighted and can be used on internet and in
messaging. Any user can manipulate the content of XML
document. The prime concern in XML documents is security.
It can be ensured by using different techniques which
guarantees integrity and confidentiality.XML documents can
be used as the cover medium for text steganography
purpose[17]. When secret data is embedded in XML document
it cannot be altered, traced back or intercepted back to the
sender.XML documents follows a database like format. SGML
(Standard Generalized Markup Language) and HTML (Hyper
Text Markup Language) are also used to send information over
internet .XML is a shortened version of SGML. XML enables
transmission, validation, definition, interpretation of data
between heterogeneous applications and computing
platform.XML deals with providing framework for tagging
structured data. XML provides flexible document definition
and processing capabilities. One of the special feature of XML
document is flexibility i.e. user can do formatting of data to be
displayed on multiple devices and platforms. Performing
steganography on XML documents is efficient as it has been
used widely for exchanging data as well as it has been
considered as a language of digital contents and web pages.
The author in his paper [17] has discussed four methods of
performing steganography on XML documents. The first
technique hides data by inserting random characters in between
XML tags and their values. This technique is known as
Random Character Technique, insertion of random characters
increases from 1 to n after each word of the tag. This process is
repeated till full stop (.) is encountered. This process is then
applied recursively to all tags in a XML document. Second
technique performs shuffling of tags which occurs in a
predetermined sequence. in this 1st tag is swapped with the last
tag, 2nd tag with second last tag. Same procedure is repeated till
all the tags are swapped. Position as well as value of the tag is
swapped. Third procedure is known as Attribute Specified
Shuffling of Tags which saves the order of tags in attributes
before shuffling. Last technique is known as Reverse Character
Technique in which sequence of characters in a tag is reversed,
for example if the tag is ‘width’ then it will be reversed as
‘htdiw’. After reversing the tag its value is also been reversed.
Procedure is repeated till full stop (.) is encountered.
III. CONCLUSION
Several research work is carried out in the area of text
steganography. With the advancement of technology and tools
available, it is now essential to develop the some
steganography algorithm which can withstand against the
attacks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to thanks Prof. Anuja Kumar Acharya, B.M.
Mehtre, Prof Munesh Chandra Trivedi for the kind of support
and discussions.
International Conference on Intelligent System and Knowledge
Engineering.
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