An overview of text steganography

Abstract

Steganography embeds a secret message inside an innocent looking cover medium, stealthily, without creating any attention. The cover medium used can be a text, image, audio, video, network packets, etc. To embed the secret, steganographic techniques rely on the redundant information of the used cover medium or the properties which human perceptual system fails to differentiate. Hence the choice of using text document as a cover medium is the most difficult one as they have less redundant information. However, as text documents are widely used in organizations, using text document as a cover medium might be a preferable choice in such environment. Considering this, this paper presents an overview of the existing techniques of text steganography and its classification. A comparison of the existing techniques is also provided.