An Approach Towards Linguistic Steganography

Abstract

Steganography is the study of building systems (stegosystems) that encrypt data in a way, such that the datagram created appears to be an innocuous message sent between two endpoints. Steganography aims to provide security by making it difficult for unprivileged endpoints to ascertain that a given message contains any hidden information. Almost all stegosystems, work by embedding the message to be transmitted onto a cover medium and the resulting datagram, which differs from a given innocuous cover by less than a decided threshold value, is then sent over an insecure channel. Most practical stegosystems have thus far used graphic media as a cover channel, but few have used natural language texts (such as English texts) as a cover medium. This paper represents various stegosystems that use natural language as a cover medium and proposes a new approach towards building such a system.