Data Security and Privacy through Text Steganography Approaches
Suvamoy Changder, Ratnakirti Roy, Narayan Chandra Debnath · 2020
The research in data security and privacy along with information hiding in this digital age is becoming extremely important in computer networks and data communications. As data communication over the Internet increases, ensuring security and privacy to the data is becoming more and more difficult and challenging. To secure the data against any unauthorized access, numerous methods including secure coding, cryptography, and steganography have been in use for many years. However, during recent years, steganography techniques have gained popularity and have attracted greater interest than other covert communication techniques. Steganography is conceived as the theory and practice of hiding information in such a way that the presence of the same remains impervious in plain sight. In steganography, a secret message is embedded inside an otherwise innocuous medium in a way that changes the intrinsic properties of the medium very negligibly, thereby hiding the message yet making it visually imperceptible. In combination with the existing network technologies, steganography can be a powerful tool to implement hidden exchanges and, therefore, can provide provable privacy and security. The primary objective of this chapter is to address the data security and privacy issues through recent research on steganography approaches and to present a text steganography system for information hiding in a secured way. At the same time, this chapter will enunciate the possibilities of applying text steganography techniques to alleviate the challenges in the Internet of Things. Considering the scope, in terms of the number of different languages, the availability of redundant characters with feature-coding option, and flexible grammar structure, Indian languages can be used for developing a system for secret digital communication. The main function of the system is to provide more security to the data. Along with security, another important focus is to propose methods for increasing the data hiding capacity of the cover media. For this purpose, the system should be consisting of new generalized and end-user-independent concepts or algorithms for data hiding. Moreover and most importantly, the system-generated cover file should be innocuous as much as possible such that any unintended recipient should not even think about the existence of any data within this cover media. In reverse, the system should also provide algorithms to extract the secret message from the cover files without any distortion to the original message. The research contributions in this chapter demonstrate the most recent advances in steganography research addressing data security and privacy. The content of this chapter will provide a significant potential benefit toward further research and development in the area of steganography, leading to new methods, algorithms, and case studies to improve data security in digital communications and the Internet of things.