A language independent algorithm to send secret messages using steganography

Abstract

The radical growth of internet & cybercrime during the last few years has forced us to think about how to improve information security efficiently during communication. Protecting the information during communication via the internet is the major challenge against eavesdropper. Encryption is a widely used technique to ensure secure communication; however, sending encrypted messages often draws an eavesdropper's attention. Steganography is a method of writing secret messages in a way that nobody, except for the sender and the recipient, suspects the existence of a hidden message. In this paper a new steganographic technique is proposed to transmit concealed messages in multi-language or combination of languages, which can be represented in Unicode. Use of inter-character spacing technique is proposed as the steganographic technique and a prototype implementation has been done with Rich Text Format (RTF) documents. An additional optimized compression technique is also proposed with enhanced user defined codes, to support Unicode language. Another advantage is that the secret message (hidden) can be in a different language than which is transmitted through the communication channel.