A compression-based text steganography method

In this study, capacity and security issues of text steganography have been considered to improve by proposing a novel approach. For this purpose, a text steganography method that employs data compression has been proposed. Because of using textual data in steganography, the employed data compression algorithm has to be lossless. Accordingly, LZW data compression algorithm has been chosen due to its frequent use in the literature and significant compression ratio. The proposed method constructs - uses stego keys and employs Combinatorics-based coding in order to increase security. Secret information has been hidden in the chosen text from the previously constructed text base that consists of naturally generated texts. Email has been chosen as communication channel between the two parties, so the stego cover has been arranged as a forward mail platform. By means of the proposed scheme, capacity has been reached to 7.042% for the secret message containing 300 characters (or 300-8 bits). Finally, comparison of the proposed scheme with the other contemporary methods in the literature has been carried out. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme provided a significant increment in terms of capacity. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.