Affiliations: School of Computer Science, MG University, Kottayam, India | Department of IT, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Cochin, India
Note: [] Corresponding author. P.M. Vidhya, Research Scholar, School of Computer Science, MG University, Kottayam 686560, India. Tel./Fax: 08547195483; E-mails: [email protected]; [email protected] (V. Paul).
Abstract: Recent researches regarding information hiding is mostly concentrating on Linguistic steganography. The Steganography is the art and science of hiding a message inside another message without drawing any suspicion to the others so that the message can only be detected by its intended recipient. Now days, concentration is made on local language encryption based steganography to provide high security for the secret information sharing. In this paper, a method to steganography is proposed with an Indian local language, Malayalam. The proposed method consists of a custom Unicode based technique with embedding based on indexing, i.e. the original message is encoded to a Malayalam text with custom UNICODE values generated for the Malayalam text. After that an embedding algorithm will be designed to mix the encoded original message with the Malayalam text. The experimental study was done to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach. The comparison study of the proposed method against an existing method revealed that, the proposed steganography methods is more precise in the encoding process and balanced in the decoding process. The proposed method achieved a precision rate of .95 and decoding rate of .81.
Keywords: Information hiding, text steganography, UNICODE, index
