Abstract

This paper discusses a novel embedding mechanism which uses hybrid methods of inter-sentence, inter-word, end-of-line and inter-paragraph spacing to embed the secret message. From the test cases analysis, the proposed system has proven that it is able to hide larger capacity compared to other current steganographic tools such as wbStego4open, SNOW and Spacemimic. From the experimental results, the proposed method is able to improve the embedding capacity approximately 1 to 2 times compared to other steganographic tools by using plain text as payload. In terms of using image files as payload, the proposed method is also able to reduce the stego-text produced from 0.1 to 1 time as compared to other steganographic tools when the payload size is less than 100 kB.

Key words: Inter-sentence, inter-word, end-of-line, inter-paragraph, steganography, information hiding.