Information Hiding Using Geographic Information System (GIS) Vector File

Abstract

There are different techniques for securing data like cryptography and information hiding (steganography and watermarking) which has received more attention and faced many challenges. In this paper, an efficient digital steganography method has been proposed, where the Geographic Information System (GIS) files used as a cover media. This method depends on hiding text file in a map vector coordinate using ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) Shape file, which stores the geometry of the digital features as sets of vector, coordinates. The method is based on changing the value of unspecific order bits depending on an Input location. Since we are interested in maximizing capacity and ensure robustness requirements. Exploiting the advantage of double percentage number capacity in the 2Dimension vector file was one of the main goals of this research. A Steganography techniques requirement was satisfied since changing maps did not raise any suspicion, while they do not alter the original data content.

Keywords

• geographic information system
• steganography
• map vector coordinate
• esri shape file format