Steganography in MS excel document using unicode system characteristics

Abstract EN

The massive explosion in computer technology and communication has encouraged the development of steganography and watermarking, breathed the spirit of steganography, and made it the top security technique to protect and preserve the rights and privacy.

So, steganography is one of the important types of information hiding techniques that has evolved a lot in the recent years.

Most text steganographic methods take the formatted text documents, such as, MS Word, PDF, PPT …etc., as a cover to hide secret information.

This study concerns the steganography in MS Excel document and proposes a new steganographic method for hiding information efficiently by Unicode system characteristics technique.

In the Unicode standard, there are two different codes for seven numbers (9 , 8, 7, 3, 2, 1, 0) in Arabic and Persian Language.

The seven numbers of (9, 8, 7, 3, 2, 1, 0) have the same shape but different codes in Unicode table.

As a result, we can hide information in MS Excel Document, by using one of these two codes. This proposed method has a high capacity.

It can hide one bit in each number in the cover_file, and it is not make any apparent changes in the original text.

So it satisfies perceptual transparency.

In our method, we have increase the level of security by encrypting the secret message before embedding it by using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-128) algorithm.