Inclusion of Unicode Standard seamless characters to expand Arabic text steganography for secure individual uses

Abstract

The need to protect confidential data stored on personal computers (PCs) or sent to other parties has increased significantly. Therefore, a secure, high-capacity strategy is needed to cover the 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 hiding secret bits in Arabic text with Unicode Standard seamless. Our method uses the contextual forms of Arabic characters to hide certain secret bits. Extra characters such as Zero-Width Joiners (ZWJ), Kashida, Medium Mathematical Spaces (MMSPs), and Zero-Width Non-Joiners (ZWNJ) are also used to further enhance the method’s capacity without diminishing the data’s security. Our experimental results show that this technique outperforms similar methods with an average improvement in capacity of more than 50%. This technique also has a higher security ratio than the other methods in this study, with the exception of Method 5, and is robust against electronic text modifications such as copying, pasting, and text formatting. Moreover, our algorithm can be widely adopted in related languages, such as Urdu and Farsi, due to its utilization of Unicode characters, which is the encoding standard used in most of the world’s writing systems.

Keywords

• Arabic steganography
• Unicode standard
• Capacity
• Information security
• Whitespace utilization
• Kashida