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A Huffman compression based text steganography method

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Abstract

In this study, capacity and security issues of text steganography have been considered by proposing a compression based approach. Because of using textual data in steganography, firstly, the employed data compression algorithm has to be lossless. Accordingly, Huffmann coding has been chosen due to its frequent use in the literature and significant compression ratio. Besides, the proposed method constructs and uses stego-keys in order to increase security. Secret information has been hidden in the chosen text from the previously constructed text base that consists of naturally generated texts. Email has been chosen as communication channel between the two parties, so the stego cover has been arranged as a forward mail platform. As the result of performed experiments, average capacity has been computed as 7.962 % for the secret message with 300 characters (or 300∙8 bits). Finally, comparison of the proposed method with the other contemporary methods in the literature has been carried out in Section 5.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technical Education Faculty, Computer and Electronic Education, Selcuk University, Konya, Turkey

    Esra Satir

  2. Technology Faculty, Electronic Engineering, Selcuk University, Konya, Turkey

    Hakan Isik

Authors
  1. Esra Satir
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  2. Hakan Isik
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Correspondence to Esra Satir.

Appendices

Annex I

Table 4 Arranged Latin Square
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Annex 2—Pseudo Codes for Embedding Phase

figure d

Annex 3—Pseudo Codes for Extracting Phase

figure e

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Satir, E., Isik, H. A Huffman compression based text steganography method. Multimed Tools Appl 70, 2085–2110 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1223-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1223-9

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