Genre-based information hiding

While data encryption is an effective means of keeping data private it does not conceal the presence of 'hidden' information, rather it serves as an indicator that such data is present. Concealing information and hiding the fact that information is hidden are both desirable traits of a confidential data exchange, especially if that exchange takes place across a public network such as the Internet. In the present paper, we describe an approach to textual steganography in which data is not only hidden, in virtue of its encoding, but the presence of hidden data is also concealed, through use of human-readable carrier texts. Information transmitted in this fashion remains confidential and its confidential nature is also concealed. The approach detailed addresses several shortcomings in previous work in this area. Specifically, we achieve a high rate of accuracy in message decoding and also produce carrier texts which are both coherent and plausible as human-readable plain text messages. These desirable features of textual steganography are accomplished through a system of sentence mapping and a genre-based approach to carrier text selection that produces contextually related content in the carrier messages. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering