Text Steganographic Approaches: A Comparison

Abstract: This paper presents three novel approaches of text steganography. The first approach uses the theme of missing letter puzzle where each character of message is hidden by missing one or more letters in a word of cover. The average Jaro score was found to be 0.95 indicating closer similarity between cover and stego file. The second approach hides a message in a wordlist where ASCII value of embedded character determines length and starting letter of a word. The third approach conceals a message, without degrading cover, by using start and end letter of words of the cover. For enhancing the security of secret message, the message is scrambled using one-time pad scheme before being concealed and cipher text is then concealed in cover. We also present an empirical comparison of the proposed approaches with some of the popular text steganographic approaches and show that our approaches outperform the existing approaches.