Security Secret Information Hiding Based on Hash Function and Invisible ASCII Characters Replacement

Feng Liu, Pengpeng Luo, Zhujuan Ma, Cheng Zhang, Yiwen Zhang, Erzhou Zhu

Abstract: The widely and frequently usage of the text document in the communication make the text-based information hiding technology still an important topic in computer security. Currently, the popularly used techniques in this area are facing many problems, such as poor robustness, lower embedding rate and semantic clutter. As a result, the secret information can be easily detected or even extracted by the interceptors. In order to cope with these problems, this paper proposes a novel secret information hiding algorithm based on the integration of the hash function and the invisible ASCII character replacement technology. Firstly, the binary secret information is encoded with even number of "1" in each group. Secondly, the space characters in each carrier segment are replaced with "SOH" by the replacement algorithm. Thirdly, the replaced segment is processed by the hash function. Finally, the algorithm is completed by comparing the generated hash values with the encoded secret information. Furthermore, by utilizing the hash collisions of the previous segment, the algorithm is improved to enhance the security and the embedding rate. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is feasible, effective and reliable.