An enhanced steganography technique for crypting andhiding Arabic text in to digital image

Abstract EN

Steganography techniques are concerned with hiding the existence of sensitive data in other cover media which may be image file, sound or video.

Today, text steganography has become particularly popular.

This paper presents a modified steganographic technique for using Arabic text in steganography.

The Arabic characters have many shapes depends on its position in the word, the idea is to superimpose multiple shapes in visible instances of Arabic diacritic marks over each other.

This is possible because of the way in which diacritic marks are displayed onscreen and printed to paper.

In this paper, an algorithm to crypt and hide Arabic texts within adigital image was proposed as steganography technique.

This algorithm consists of four stages; the first stage deals with a procedure to crypt the Arabic text, each character in each form(including special characters) has a special 16 bit code which called Unicode instead of 8 bits to increase the complexity of retrieving data.

The second stage is a procedure to hide a crypt text within digital image using LSB techniques.

The third stage is a procedure to extract a hidden text from that image.

Finally, the fourth stage is a procedure to decrypt the crypted text by returning the original code of each character.

The program of the proposed algorithm has been built using Delphi 2010, and the results were obtained with high and security which proved the efficiency of the algorithm, where the hidden Arabic text didn’t make any distortion or change over the cover image.