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Involving Spaces of Unicode Standard Within Irreversible Arabic Text Steganography for Practical Implementations

  • Research Article-Computer Engineering and Computer Science
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Abstract

This paper introduces a novel method for Arabic text steganography for irreversible practical usage that involves using the spaces in Unicode standard. The method also benefits from several characters in the Arabic language that can be changed based on their locations within words. The main innovation of this proposed method is the utilization of the different typescripts of Unicode standard for each letter shape. The technique also utilizes spaces and other Unicode features of Arabic e-text to hide secret data. This method depends on the use of contextual forms of Arabic characters and whitespaces to irreversibly hide certain specific secret bits. Additionally, the method employs the extra characters zero-width-joiner and Kashida to further enhance embedding capacity while preserving maximum security. The research implementation experiments show that this technique outperforms most available existing irreversible methods in both capacity and security. Moreover, this procedure can be widely adopted in related languages, such as Urdu and Farsi, due to their use of similar Unicode features, which is the encoding standard used in most of the world’s writing systems.

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Umm Al-Qura University (UQU) for all motivation and support toward this research. Thanks also for Al-Jouf University for this wonderful graduate studies cooperation giving Miss Norah Alanazi the chance to be teaching assistant and to continue her MS research in the field of information security at UQU–Makkah under supervision of Dr Esam Khan and Prof. Adnan Gutub.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information and Computer Sciences Department, Jouf University, Skaka, Saudi Arabia

    Norah Alanazi

  2. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Institute of the Hajj and Umrah Research, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia

    Esam Khan

  3. Computer Engineering Department, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia

    Adnan Gutub

Authors
  1. Norah Alanazi
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  2. Esam Khan
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  3. Adnan Gutub
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Correspondence to Adnan Gutub.

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Alanazi, N., Khan, E. & Gutub, A. Involving Spaces of Unicode Standard Within Irreversible Arabic Text Steganography for Practical Implementations. Arab J Sci Eng 46, 8869–8885 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-021-05605-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-021-05605-8

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