Text Steganography using Helping Verbs

Steganography is the art and science of hiding a message inside a cover message. This message can only be detected by the intended recipient of the message. Steganography can be classified into image, text, audio and video steganography, this classification is based on the type of cover media used to hide the message. Text steganography can involve anything from changing the formatting of an existing text, to changing words within a text, to generating random character sequences or using context-free grammars to generate readable texts. The problem with text steganography is that if slight change has been done to the document then it will become visible to the third party or attacker. The key to this problem is that to alter the document in such a way that it is simply not visible to the human eye yet it is possible to decode it with computer. In our proposed approach we hide the message in the cover text using the concept of apostrophe and helping verbs. Firstly, the message is encrypted using one time pad technique and then converted into tertiary code. After this the cover text is searched for any helping verbs which would match the ones given in the table which stores the various helping verbs and their apostrophe form. If we want to store 0 we dont modify the cover text by keeping the helping verb in its original form, to hide 1 in the cover text we convert the helping verb in the cover text into its apostrophe form and to hide 2 The helping verb is converted into its apostrophe form and concatenated with the previous word but with a space in between. This process goes on again and again until all the message bits are hidden in the cover text.