Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Second International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP-2013)
ECR(Encryption with Cover Text and Reordering)
based Text Steganography
Sahil Kataria Kavita Singh
Department of Computer Engineering Department of Computer Engineering
Govt. Engineering College Bikaner Govt. Engineering College Bikaner
Bikaner, India Bikaner, India
[email protected] [email protected] Tarun Kumar Maninder Singh Nehra
Department of Computer Engineering Department of Computer Engineering
Govt. Engineering College Bikaner Govt. Engineering College Bikaner
Bikaner, India Bikaner, India
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract—This paper presents ECR(Encryption with Cover cryptography as the third party is always aware of the
Text and Reordering) based text steganography approach which communication, steganography is used more for concealing the
works on simple encryption technique using ExOR Operation of original message. Steganography gained importance after the
two characters and reorder them which would be more secured advent of 9/11 because the US and the British government
and hard to fetch original message from enciphered text. Our banned the use of cryptography as third party is still aware of
encrypted text is reordered using Eight bit random key for hiding the communication at present.
our data in a more secure way. Our Eight bit random key will
contain four number of zero and four number of one where one Steganography overcomes this limitation by hiding our
bit describes our encrypted text and zero bit describes cover text. secret message in an innocent looking object called cover
We are also merging our random key with our enciphered text at media which can be any text,image,video. Most steganographic
the last. We are also presenting comparison of our proposed algorithm methods use images, audios, videos and text files as
approach with some of the previous popular text steganographic the cover medium and rely on the changes in the features and
approaches with load time and also the data which will be structure of the target medium in such a manner that is not
required to be enciphered using n bit cover text. At the last we identifiable by human eyes. However, text medium is relatively
are showing that how our approaches are performing best in the difficult as compared to other target media because of lack of
existing approaches. As our approach generates 2n bytes where n available redundant information in text data. In this paper, we
are no. of bytes in our plain text and n bytes for cover text and are presenting an overview of Text steganography and various
reordering using random key.
existing text-based steganography methods. The main problem
Keywords—Information,Hiding,Reordering,key-based with many existing methods of Text Steganography is that it
steganography,Steganography,Cryptography,Encryption,Text uses large cover text for hiding our secret message and also it
Steganography takes too much time in encryption and decryption. We have
introduced new approaches for text Steganography which
I. INTRODUCTION would be easy for encryption and decryption but hard to fetch
Steganography means conceal communication. The main the original message from encrypted text.
goal of steganography is to transmit a message in such a way This paper presents ECR(Encryption with Cover Text
i.e. text, image, audio or video over a communication channel and Reordering) based text steganography approach which
in order to effectively conceal the existence of the message. works on simple encryption technique using Ex-OR Operation
Steganography is a technique of hiding our original text in such of two characters and reorder them which would be more
a way that no one else except sender and intended recipient can secured and hard to fetch original message from enciphered
understand it just by simply looking to our enciphered text. text. Our encrypted text is reordered using 8-bit random key for
Basically there are two ways of encryption for our plain text for hiding our data in a more secure way. Our 8-bit random key
secure data transfer over the Internet which is Cryptography will contains four 1’s and four 0’s where 1's bit describes our
and Steganography. Cryptography technique is used to protect encrypted text and 0's bit describes cover text. We are also
the contents of message using public/private key and merging our random key with our enciphered text at the last.
Steganography can be used to hide the existence of our original We are also presenting comparison of our proposed approach
message using cover text. Because of some limitation in with some of the previous popular text steganographic
978-1-4673-6101-9/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 612
Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Second International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP-2013)
approaches with load time and also the data which will be is changed. So, considering some problems like format
required to be enciphered using n-bit cover text. At the last we changing,changing meaning of secret data, etc. in existing text
are showing that how our approaches are performing best in steganography methods next CASE approaches comes for text
the existing approaches .As our approach generates 2n+1 bytes steganography. This method uses grouping of letters as per
where n are no. of bytes in our plain text and n bytes for cover alphabet shapes. Letters which have only one vertical line are
text and 1 byte holding random key for reordering. grouped into one and letters which contains circle or curve are
We are presenting presenting here some existing text grouped into others. This method is better as compared to
steganography technique with their result of time execution for previous methods as data would not be lost in case of format
encryption and decryption and how many bytes of data we can changing or meaning of data is also not changed but all these
send with cover text.Next we will describe our proposed existing methods and CASE approaches hide less bytes of data
approaches with implementation algorithm for encryption and and take too much time to encrypt and decrypt the data. So this
decryption. We are also describing our technique using an would be time overhead for the encryption of our text.
example so that it would be easy to understand our proposed So we have Proposed a new approach which is far
approach. In the next section we are showing the results of our better than other existing approaches. In the next section we
proposed methods and comparing with the existing methods. will describe our approach with implementation details that
As every coin has two facets so this method also has some how our method works. We will also show that our proposed
merits and demerits which we will try to remove in future. approaches take very less time overhead and memory overhead
II. RELATED WORK as compared to existing approaches .Also we can hide more
number of bytes using proposed approach. Required cover text
The aim of Steganography technique is to hide some size is also very small in proposed approach which will be
significant data in such a manner so that it can hide in some equal to our original text.
cover media . It is necessary to use some other redundant data
as a cover for the existing valid data. The probable media that III. THE PROPOSED APPROACH
can be used as a cover can be text, image or a movie clip. Out This model(ECR) is used to encrypt our plain text using simple
of these different media files, a text file normally contains encryption techniques by Ex-or operation of each byte of plain
lesser storage and use less memory as compared to other text with cover text.As Ex-Or Operation is very fast and easy
media. In addition, text data can communicate more process for encryption and decryptoin so this approach taking
information and needs less cost for printing, too. On the other less time overhead. This Ex-or Operation between plain text
hand, the structure of image file or video file is changed as per and cover text would generate an enciphered text which would
original file after encryption, because more attributes about the be merge with same cover text.The merging of these two
data is required to be stored. This causes complication in our strings of enciphered text and cover text using 8-bit random
techniques as compared to handle a text file. Hence,text cover key reordering method. This steganography approach is easy to
media is always preferable to be used in Steganography – such encrypt our plain text as only one Ex-or operation is performed
an approach is known as Text Steganography. so it's very fast as compared to other previous techniques
In Text steganography there are many methods are making our techniques more secure and hide our original text
available. Some methods change format of text while some in cover text in a better way .We are reordering whole text
other methods change actual word to hide secret data as per using 8-bit random key. This would make more harder
cover text. In an Open Space method white space is used to technique so it would be hard to fetch original text or also hard
hide our secret data. Some other methods are available which to judge that the text contain some secret data. Reordering is
are using white spaces for hiding secret message are Inter- performed as per 8-bit random key which would have four 1's
Sentence space method and End-of-line space method and and four 0's on random position. So we will arrange our cipher
Inter-word space method. These methods are not used as much text as per this random key. We will place the enciphered text
as data would be lost if somehow format of file is changed. when we will find 1's in our 8-bit key corresponding to our
Then other method is Semantic method which is used to hide final enciphered text and place same cover text when 0 is found
secret message by changing actual words. In this method in the 8-bit key. In addition ,we are also going to send our 8-bit
Synonyms are used to hide secret data such as 0 and 1.Where key in different way just by placing our random key at the last
as Syntactic method uses punctuations to hide secret data like character of our cipher text which would be easy to get during
commas(,) and full stop(.). This method is better than previous decryption. At the time of decryption first we will fetch 8-bit
one but this would change meaning of our original text when random key from last character of enciphered text and then we
we have more punctuations in our text file. In an acronyms and will create two array strings in which one will contain cover
semantic method, meaning of information can be changed text and the other will contain encipher text so next we will
because these methods uses actual word replacement or generate our original text using same Ex-Or operation b/w
punctuation method to hide secret data. After this technique a cover text string and encipher text string. So if we have n bytes
new terminology comes which uses characteristics of that of cover text then we can hide n bytes of plain text. Finally we
particular language to hide data such as in Persian/Arabic Text need 2n+1 bytes to send which will have 8-bit random
steganography and Hindi Text steganography. So we need a key,cover text and enciphered text.
method which will encipher our secret data without changing
meaning of text and also data would not be lost if format of file
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Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Second International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP-2013)
IV. IMPLEMENTATION ADD 1 in enc
End IF
FOR IMPLEMENTATION OF OUR PROPOSED APPROACH WE HAVE ELSE
DEVELOPED TWO ALGORITHMS FOR HIDING AND RETRIEVING IF enc < len/2 THEN
OUR SECRET MESSAGE. WE HAVE IMPLEMENTED THIS encipher[enc]=hidden_message[i];
TECHNIQUES IN PHP. ADD 1 in enc
Pseudo code for message hiding ELSE
Procedure ECR_stegano_hide (String msg, String covertext) encipher[cov]=hidden_message[i];
begin; ADD 1 in cov
End IF
For i=0 to 8 END IF
// 8-bit random key four 1's and four 0's END For
key[i]=random(0,1);
End For For i=0 to len/2
For i=0 to msg.length() original_msg[i] = covertext[i]^encipher[i];
encipher[i] = msg[i]^covertext[i]; End For
End For
return original_msg;
SET cov to 0 End Procedure
SET enc to 0
For i=0 to 2*msg.length()
Example description for Encryption
IF key[i%8]==0 THEN
IF cov < msg.length() THEN 1) Let us assume that our plain text is “abce” which is shown in
hidden_message[i]=covertext[cov]; figure-1.
ADD 1 in cov
ELSE Fig. 1
hidden_message[i]=encipher[enc]; 2) Generated random key is 10110100 which is shown in
ADD 1 in enc figure-2
End IF
ELSE
IF enc < msg.length() THEN Fig. 2
hidden_message[i]=encipher[enc]; 3) Generated Random cover text is
ADD 1 in enc
ELSE Fig. 3
hidden_message[i]=encipher[cov]; 4) Performing Ex-Or Operation b/w Cover text and original
ADD 1 in cov message which is shown in figure-4
End IF
END IF
END For
STORE key in hidden_message[i];
return hidden_message;
End Procedure
Pseudo Code for Message Retrieval
Procedure ECR_steno_unhide(string hidden_message)
begin;
Fig. 4
SET len to hidden_message.length(); 5) Merge Cover text and encipher text which was generated
STORE hidden_message[len] to key; from previous step as per 8-bit random key.
SET cov to 0
SET enc to 0
Fig. 5
For i=0 to len-1 6). Add our key at the end of hidden_message
IF key[i%8]==0 THEN
IF cov < len/2 THEN
covertext[cov]= hidden_message[i]; Fig. 6
ADD 1 in cov
ELSE
encipher[enc]=hidden_message[i];
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Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Second International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP-2013)
Example description for Decryption
1) Get the hidden text message in a string which is shown in TABLE 1 EXECUTION TIME AND COVER TEXXT SIZE REQUIRES FOR HIDING
Figure-7
Text Message CoverText No. Of Bytes Time
Steganograp Text Size(Bytes) Can Overhead(m
Fig. 7 hy Size(Bytes) hide(Bytes) s)
Techniques
2) Get the key value from last character of our hidden message
which is shown in figure-8 Feature 600 1980 52 20,289
Coding
Fig. 8
3) Read the character one by one and put in two string variable Inter Word 600 1980 45 22,604
where str1 contains cover text and str2 contains encipher text space
which is shown in figure-9.
CASE 600 1980 200 1,666
Fig. 9 CEBTS 600 1980 424 71.012
4) Perform Ex-Or operation b/w cover text and encipher text
which we have fetched in previous step. ECR 600 1980 600 15-20
Technique
Fig. 10
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
This section shows the performance of proposed approaches
and compares the results in forms of length of hiding message
and time overhead with existing text steganographic
approaches.
Fig. 11. Maximum Cover Text required to hide 200 bytes and 1000 bytes
Length Capacity defines how many bytes of data will be
required to be sent from sender to receiver while secret
message is of n bytes.
Capacity ratio = (amount of hidden bytes) / (size of the cover
text in bytes)
Assuming, one character occupies one byte in memory, we
have calculated the percentage capacity which is capacity ratio
multiplied by 100.If we want to hide n bytes of secret message
we will require total 2n+1 bytes of cover text. So for this, our
capacity ratio is defined as:-
Capacity ratio = n/(2n+1)*100 = 50% approx.
Below we are showing comparison of some existing
approaches results with our proposed approach in form of time
overhead and no. of bytes hide with fix amount of cover text
Fig. 12. Time Overhead for all approaches
for all text steganography approaches.We can see that our
proposed approach is hiding all message with fix cover text
and also taking too less time overhead for encryption and
decryption process.
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Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Second International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP-2013)
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have proposed new approach for text-based
steganography for English language text. In this approach, we
are using simple Ex-Or Operation for enciphering our secret
message and reordering as per 8-bit random key for more
secure way. Based on our survey of the existing Text
Steganography approaches, we have shown that our proposed
approach can hide more number of bytes and it has also very
small cover text and required very less time overhead as
compared to other techniques. In addition, our proposed
approach is also immune to retyping and reformatting of
text.This Approach generating an non-sense message which
can be used in cloud computing where we need only to store
the data in large so this techniques will take less time to
encrypt the data and also take too much less memory to store
the data on the servers.
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