WoSPA 2008 – 5^th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing and its Applications, UNIVERSITY OF SHARJAH, SHARJAH, U.A.E. 18 – 20 MARCH 2008

ARABIC TEXT STEGANOGRAPHY USING MULTIPLE DIACRITICS

Adnan Abdul-Aziz Gutub, Yousef Salem Elarian, Sameh Mohammad Awaideh, Aleem Khalid Alvi

Computer Engineering Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Steganography techniques are concerned with hiding the existence of data in other cover media. Today, text steganography has become particularly popular. This paper presents a new idea for using Arabic text in steganography. The main idea is to superimpose multiple invisible instances of Arabic diacritic marks over each other. This is possible because of the way in which diacritic marks are displayed on screen and printed to paper. Two approaches and several scenarios are proposed. The main advantage is in terms of the arbitrary capacity. The approach was compared to other similar methods in terms of overhead on capacity. It was shown to exceed any of these easily, provided the correct scenario is chosen.

Keywords— Arabic; capacity; diacritic marks; steganography; text hiding.