A Multi-Layer Hybrid Text Steganography for Secret Communication Using Word Tagging and RGB Color Coding

Abstract

This paper introduces a multi-layer hybrid text steganography approach by utilizing word tagging and recoloring. Existing approaches are planned to be either progressive in getting imperceptibility, or high hiding limit, or robustness. The proposed approach does not use the ordinary sequential inserting process and overcome issues of the current approaches by taking a careful of getting imperceptibility, high hiding limit, and robustness through its hybrid work by using a linguistic technique and a format-based technique. The linguistic technique is used to divide the cover text into embedding layers where each layer consists of a sequence of words that has a single part of speech detected by POS tagger, while the format-based technique is used to recolor the letters of a cover text with a near RGB color coding to embed 12 bits from the secret message in each letter which leads to high hidden capacity and blinds the embedding, moreover, the robustness is accomplished through a multi-layer embedding process, and the generated stego key significantly assists the security of the embedding messages and its size. The experimental results comparison shows that the purpose approach is better than currently developed approaches in providing an ideal balance between imperceptibility, high hiding limit, and robustness criteria.