A Novel Approach for Text Steganography: Generating Text Summary Using Reflection Symmetry

Steganography is the art and science of covered or hidden writing. The purpose of steganography is covert communication to hide the existence of a message from the prying eyes. Digital Steganography algorithms have been developed by using texts, images and audio as the cover media. However, using text as the target medium is relatively difficult as compared to the other target media, because of the lack of available redundant information in a text file. This paper presents an approach for text steganography through a technique that uses reflection symmetry of the English alphabets. To hide secret data bits, the proposed method checks the vertical and horizontal reflection symmetry properties of the characters present in each sentence of the text and, if followed, it selects the sentence to generate a summary of the text, known as cover text or stego- text. Similarly at the extraction end, the receiver checks for the reflection symmetry properties followed by the characters present in the sentences of the stego- text and places the corresponding bits to get the secret message from the summary generated by the hiding process. The proposed method exhibits a satisfactory experimental result with the cover text chosen from different daily newspapers.