Efficient security and capacity techniques for Arabic text steganography via engaging Unicode standard encoding

Steganography is the science of hiding information messages in groups of irrelevant datapossibly of another form. Despite of several Arabic text steganography techniques thathave been proposed in the literature, there are only limited number of researches thatshowed high steganography quality in terms of capacity and security. In this paper, wepresent a novel approach for hiding the secret bits within Arabic text by engagingUnicode standard. Our methods rely on the use of contextual form of Arabic charactersto hide certain secret bits showing interesting feedback. Moreover, extra characters suchas Zero-width-Joiner or Zero-width-without-joiner, Kashida, and MMSP, are all also usedto further enhance the capacity, while preserving acceptable security. Our testing resultsshow that these proposed techniques outperform most reviewed existing methods to bepractical, i.e. in order of both efficiency measures of capacity and security. Moreover, ourtechniques can be widely adopted due to the use of Unicode, in Arabic as well as UrduLanguages, which is opening the research field for the encoding standards to be utilizeddifferently benefitting the ongoing evolving World’s text writing systems .