WhiteSteg: A new scheme in information hiding using text steganography

Sending encrypted messages frequently will draw the attention of third parties, i.e. crackers and hackers, perhaps causing attempts to break and reveal the original messages. In this digital world, steganography is introduced to hide the existence of the communication by concealing a secret message inside another unsuspicious message. The hidden message maybe plaintext, or any data that can be represented as a stream of bits. Steganography is often being used together with cryptography and offers an acceptable amount of privacy and security over the communication channel. This paper presents an overview of text steganography' and a brief history of steganography along with various existing techniques of text steganography. Highlighted are some of the problems inherent in text steganography as well as issues with existing solutions. A new approach, named WhiteSteg is proposed in information hiding using inter-word spacing and inter-paragraph spacing as a hybrid method to reduce the visible detection of the embedded messages. WhiteSteg offers dynamic generated cover-text with six options of maximum capacity according to the length of the secret message. Besides, the advantage of exploiting whitespaces in information hiding is discussed. This paper also analyzes the significant drawbacks of each existing method and how WhiteSteg could be recommended as a solution.