New Approach in E-mail Based Text Steganography

Abstract: In this study combination of lossless compression techniques and Vigenere cipher was used in the e-mail based text steganography. It makes use of email addresses to be the keys to embed/to extract the secret message into/from the email text (cover text). After selecting the cover text that has highest repetition pattern regarding to the secret message the distance matrix was formed. The members of distance matrix were compressed by following lossless compression algorithms as in written sequence; Run Length Encoding (RLE) + Burrows Wheeler Transform (BWT) + Move to Front (MTF) + Run Length Encoding (RLE) + Arithmetic Encoding (ARI). Later on Latin Square was used to form stego key 1and then Vigenere cipher was used to increase complexity of extracting stego key 1. Final step was to choose e-mail addresses by using stego key 1 (K1) and stego key 2 (K2) to embed secret message into forward e-mail platform. The experimental results showed that proposed method has reasonable performance in terms of capacity and also higher security in terms of complexity