A Meliorated Kashida-Based Approach for Arabic Text Steganography

Steganography is an art of hiding a secret message within some cover media such as: images, audios, videos, and texts. Many algorithms have been proposed for Arabic text steganography exploiting some features of Arabic language such as: diacritics, extension character (kashida), and pointed letters. In this research we propose a new method to enhance a kashida-based methods for text steganography. In which each existing kashida can hide two bits instead of only one bit. In addition, security measures is increased through embedding the secret bits into the cover text by two different ways since the cover text is divided into two blocks; each one of them is being treated in different way. Moreover, the original kashida in the cover text is ignored by the extractor. A system is designed to achieve the embedding as well as the extracting with high degree of security through authentication operation used in its interface. The proposed approach is tested and compared with the most related kashida-based approaches in terms of capacity and the results are promising. Furthermore, it overcomes the limitations of other approaches, maintain a reasonable increases in the files size, and enhances security measures.