Information hiding: A new approach in 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 a digital world, steganography is introduced to hide the existence of the communication by concealing a secret message inside another unsuspicious message. 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 text-based steganography techniques. Highlighted are some of the problems inherent in text steganography as well as issues with existing solutions. A new approach is proposed in information hiding using inter-word spacing and inter-paragraph spacing as a hybrid method. Our method offers dynamic generated stego-text with six options of maximum capacity according to the length of the secret message. This paper also analyzed the significant drawbacks of each existing method and how our new approach could be recommended as a solution.