Unified inter-letter steganographic algorithm, a text-based data hiding method

Abstract EN

This paper funds a novel text-based steganographic algorithm with enhanced functionality with respect to the previously proposed methods, by careful selection of one of standard space characters, the introduced Inter-Letter Steganographic Method, or Visual and Reverse Extraction attacks, two additional modes of operation have been added to the original InLetSteg algorithm and have been merged into a single one, called as Unified Inter-Letter Steganographic Method, or UILS.

The Unified Inter-Letter Steganographic Method (UILS) embeds the data using variable step-size into the host text and the developed mathematical model can calculate the approximate length of the host text required to embed certain data, statistically.

In addition, the general mathematical model of UILS makes it customizable to adapt the real-world applications.

The statistical parameters that are used through this work are calculated for English host text, but are easily calculable for other languages with similar alphabets and structure of notations.

Finally, the programmatically deployed UILS outputs are experimentally examined using 60 attendant and the results are discussed.