A high capacity algorithm for information hiding in Arabic text

Recently, the need for digital communication has increased greatly. As a result, the Internet has become the most economical and speedy medium of communication today. Nevertheless, such accessible communication channels have a great chance of being exposed to security threats causing illegal information access. Steganography provides a type of data hiding method that disguises the presence of the secret messages in the media. In this paper, a steganography algorithm for information hiding in Arabic text is proposed. The new algorithm improves the length of the secret message that can be embedded in an Arabic text document without affecting its quality as much as possible. The proposed algorithm utilizes different characteristics and properties of Arabic language. It utilizes both the Arabic extension character (Kashida) and small space characters. Each existing Kashida can hide one bit and each existing space can hide three bits. The proposed algorithm was tested for different length stego-text messages. It provides superiority in achieving high capacity hiding ratio in comparison with the most related Kashida-based techniques and spaces-based techniques. (C) 2018 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University.