Secured communication using Steganography Framework with sample RTF implementation

Abstract

It is important to have secured communication channels as we often need to share our secret information. Encryption is one of the widely used techniques to ensure secure communication, however, sending encrypted messages often draw eavesdropper's attention to intercept the messages and reveal the original message. The concept of steganography focuses on embedding secret information into the digital media such as images, audio, video files and even in text documents, without drawing any attention of eavesdropper to think that such information is embedded. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed in information hiding, by using a common framework that will generate the digital stegano medium. As a proof of concept, we propose a module that will support this framework, using inter-character spacing and an optimized approach for message compression by custom bit encoding on RTF documents (Rich Text Format). Level of security is further enhanced by supporting encryption and diffusion, before applying the Steganography.